If ever there were a woman who embodied the laziest media stereotypes about Millennials, it would be me. I’m a 28-year-old upper-middle-class white chick from the East Coast. I drifted down the placid Nile of my youth on a barge of praise and attention, dressed in an endless rotation of “those matching pajamas from Hanna Andersson.”

As an adult, I’m a little lazy about things like laundry and changing the water cooler at the office. And I often believe, over the quiet protests of my better judgment, that I’m “the main character of a very special story.”

I always feared that these qualities would make me a terrible parent one day. It’s like my 27-year-old-friend Lily* wrote to me recently: “My whole sense of self is a delicate interplay of instant gratification and deluded ambition overlaid with NO COMPROMISES. I truly cannot see this mixing with parenthood.”

A year ago, I would have agreed with her. Then, however, I had a baby, and I’m surprised at how much my Special Snowflake attitudes have eased my transition into motherhood. Not only that: in the long term, I think they’ll make me a happier, more effective parent.

This may sound counterintuitive, if not outright ridiculous. I know, I know. But I still think there's value in sharing my story, if only to reassure other members of the so-called "Idle Trophy Generation" that they, too, will not necessarily suck at being parents just because they feel a little spoiled and immature. If you love your kids and are truly committed to being a nurturing and effective parent, there's an upside to having some less-than-altruistic instincts.

To explain what I mean, let me break it down for you by my stereotypically millennial flaws.

Egotistical Flaw #1: I think I’m interesting.

Although I’ve spent my life chasing achievements—educational, personal, professional—my self-esteem isn’t founded on them. Thanks in part to my “you’ll always be a winner” upbringing, which I now believe was a tremendous gift, a small part of me will always suspect that I am fascinating and worthwhile.

The decision of whether to work or stay at home with my baby is, and will continue to be, extremely difficult (and I recognize it's a privilege to have that choice at all). But I’m not worried that I’ll feel like less of a superstar if I stay home or less of a supermom if I work.

Deep down, I’ll always be pleased with myself. And I’m glad I’ll be able to model that existential happiness for my son.

Egotistical Flaw #2: I feel entitled to a fulfilling life.

I don’t expect anyone to cater to my needs, but I do think I deserve personal fulfillment, and I’m willing to pursue it at the expense of other people’s opinions about me (although not at the expense of my child's well-being).

I originally conceptualized this idea as an entitlement to balanced work, play, and family time. But my as my brilliant friend Anne, 35, pointed out to me in an email, “Searching for that perfect triangulation seems somehow simplistic, because they might not be the most meaningful and fulfilling pillars.”

Here’s how she describes her own set of priorities, which I’m going to steal: “Feeling nurtured, providing nurture, feeling creatively stimulated, feeling like I’m making a positive difference in the world…and feeling content with myself—being content to simply ‘be…’. Basically, I’m striving for contentment—which means abandoning the ongoing compulsion to calibrate my happiness, particularly in relation to others my age.”

Finding such contentment will be a dynamic process, requiring different choices at different times in life. But once it becomes clear what the right choices are for me and my family, I’m not going to seek anyone’s permission to make them.

My family’s health and well-being will always my top priority; my personal fulfillment is a close second. Period.

Egotistical Flaw #3: I don’t kill myself with busywork.

To my delight (and consternation), I’ve arrived at the stage of life involving a job and a baby and a husband and a mortgage and in-laws—only to discover that I’m STILL not as crazy-busy as I was at my achievement-focused high school.

If there’s one thing an overscheduled childhood teaches you, it’s how to prioritize—to cut whatever corners you can and focus on the things that matter. As a result, I’m well-practiced at saying “no.” And it’s made adulthood a lot easier.

No, I can’t do the dishes tonight; I don’t care if it means a messy kitchen for 12 hours. No, I can’t work after 5; the emails can be answered tomorrow. And no, I don’t feel guilty --although I am sometimes a little embarrassed by the number of discarded socks on my floor.

Of course, there are millions of people in this country who HAVE to work constantly to stay afloat. I realize that I’m writing from and about a position of huge privilege.

But there are also tons of busy-busy-busy bourgeois people who perform frantic lives just to appear important. I see through this—or at least I think I do; maybe I’m kidding myself—and choose not to participate. And I hope to be able to pass this skill down to my son.

Egotistical Flaw #4: I overshare.

I’m not afraid to divulge details of my personal life in public. I try to respect other people’s privacy, but I’m an open book about me.

Last winter, I found myself pregnant and with no maternity plan on my health insurance. Looking down the barrel of potentially tens of thousands of dollars in hospital costs, I took to Facebook to ask my 1300-odd friends for advice.

My mother was horrified—talking about medical stuff! And finances! On social media!—but with the help of responses to that post and my awesome employers, I was able to get the coverage I needed.

Now, I’m doing the same thing with parenting issues. If I’ve got a problem or question and can discuss it without compromising my son’s privacy, I have no problem sharing it with a big audience. It’s usually the fastest way to find an answer.

They live 20 minutes away and visit twice a week. They worry, worry, worry about me, my baby, my husband, my dog. They bring us take-out and offer to babysit.

I think they’re wonderful. We’re super-close. They’re loving, involved, still working themselves, and much more energetic than my own grandparents were in their 60’s. My son is already benefiting from their influence in his life.

What’s so bad about helicopters, anyway? They help people fly.

Egotistical Flaw #6: I crave novelty.

My 27-year-old friend Anais worries that her compulsive multitasking will make her a bad parent. “My shortened, flippant attention span may turn me into one of those moms that ‘mmhmms’ without ever listening—may influence my ability to sit with child and help with homework, or read stories, or otherwise appreciate those quiet family moments my childless womb suspects are key to motherhood,” she writes.

I’m worried about this too. I love my son and crave one-on-one time with him, yet I reflexively dive for my phone when he's not actively engaging with me. It’s an ongoing struggle.

That said, there’s an upside to this restlessness. I get my baby out of the house a lot, because I’d go crazy otherwise. My mind goes a mile a minute thinking up new adventures, new songs and stories, new silly noises I can make to entertain him.

My friend Alice, 29, said it best: “In our world, we have SO MANY ways to satisfy curiosity and learn about things. I hope that translates into teaching kids how to explore and find out about things—online or offline—and that having lots of interests is OK.”

I’ve been a mom for all of five months, so I’m hardly qualified to make final pronouncements on parenting. I’m sure there will come a time when the obliterating love I feel for my son will come into conflict with my personal ambitions and desires, and my stereotypically Millennial personality will be a hindrance rather than a help.

For now, though, I’m pleasantly surprised by how comfortable I feel as a parent. And I’m optimistic that as more twentysomethings start to have kids, they’ll feel the same way.

Before a baby came out of me last month, I’d never been alone with one before. I was the youngest in my family; I avoided high-school babysitting gigs like the Hanta virus; my only close friend who has a baby lives 3,000 miles away.

When it came to maternity leave, therefore, I had only the vaguest notions of what to expect, forged in the fire of "Sex and the City" reruns and various articles on the Internet. I understood that caring for my newborn baby would be difficult -- unimaginably so. I was aware that sleep deprivation would be involved, as would a rotation of spit up-stained sweatshirts. And I knew I shouldn’t plan to catch up on my reading, because I wouldn’t have any free hands.

I was also confident I’d have a nervous breakdown. It seemed like every article I read on the topic included at least one postpartum depression horror story, either in the comments or the piece itself. The eggnog of my brain is spiked with the rum of anxiety at even the best of times, so I put my therapist on speed dial and braced for the worst.

A selfie I took at the bottom of the emotional roller coaster.

Surprise! Like pregnancy and childbirth, maternity leave turned out to be one of those things that defied my expectations and pop-cultural cliché. Sure, it’s been tough, but not in the ways I was anticipating. And some of the things I thought would be hideous have turned out to be easy.

Every mother’s experience is different, but here’s mine.

Maternity leave is a lot like the show “Lost” -- or at least the three seasons of that show I watched before I got bored. Remember the Hatch -- the mysterious bunker where people lived in isolation, entering a series of numbers into a computer every 108 minutes because they had a vague sense that the world would end if they didn’t? Maternity leave is totally the Hatch. There are a series of brainless tasks you have to do roughly every 108-180 minutes, 24 hours a day -- feed, diaper, burp; new onesie if any of the above were explosive -- and if you don’t do them, the baby will scream and you’re a bad mother.

None of this stuff is hard. I always secretly believed that the whole “motherhood is the hardest job in the world” line was condescending bullshit, and I was right -- sort of. What I didn’t realize, however, was that easy stuff becomes hard when you have to do it over and over and over 24/7. Motherhood requires a radical restructuring of the way you experience and use time, and that’s the real rub.

Changing your sleep patterns is the hardest of all. You know that cliché, “Sleep when the baby sleeps?” I always thought it only applied if you had one of those colicky babies who stayed up crying all night. Some people lucked out and got sleepy babies and didn’t need to drop everything when the baby went down, right?!

Yeah, no. I’m one of the lucky ones: My baby came out of the womb wanting to sleep from 1:00-11:00 every morning. But what I didn’t realize was that when they’re less than three months old, even good sleepers need to wake up 3-5 times a night -- for around 45 minutes at a stretch. Meaning I’m not getting a “night’s sleep” these days so much as an unsatisfying series of naps.

I used to be the sort of person who’d rather not sleep at all if I had to get up again in 2 hours. Not anymore. If I don’t fall asleep right away after the baby’s nighttime feedings, I lose precious minutes before it’s time for my next round in the Hatch. There’s no time to noodle on my phone or finish the episode of "Breaking Bad" I was watching. (I’ve watched so many of those, by the way, that I’m terrified my baby’s first word is going to be “Heisenberg.”)

When my baby naps during the day, I don’t need to go to sleep at the same time. But the thing is, my days are still extremely compressed. By the time I get out of bed with the baby in the morning, feed him, change him, wheel him into my bathroom in his bassinet, shower while singing Arcade Fire at top volume because for some reason he’s only comforted by the musical stylings of Regine Chassagne, and then put on clothes, it’s 12:30 p.m. Everything I do outside of my bedroom must take place in the eight hours between then and 8:30, when my exhausted husband and I start our bedtime ritual.

Which brings me to another way my maternity leave is like “Lost:” I have become a woman out of time. Days bleed together, one into the other. I routinely forget what day of the week it is. I cram work emails, xoJane posts, and everything computer-related into the fistful of 15- and 20-minute slivers I get between daytime feedings, changes, and tummy time. It’s taken me four days to write this much.

I consider every day a success if I meet four simple goals:

Just walking to the coffee shop five blocks away requires 20 minutes of preparation and the meticulous packing of a diaper bag, so this is harder than it sounds.

Feel the outside air.

Talk in person to someone not related to me.

Keep my baby alive.

Keep my baby not stewing in his own feces.

This new routine has put me on an emotional roller coaster. For the first three or four days, I was crying every night because of the constant waking up. Then I spent about a week absolutely thrilled with my life: sleeping in every day! No pressure to do anything all day but hold my baby and watch Netflix topless!

Then the tears came back for another few days, because I’m an extrovert and all my energy drains away if I don’t get out of the house and talk to people. So I did that, and now I’m cool.

One thing that hasn’t materialized for me, however, is full-on postpartum depression. I think one would have to be one’s own special kind of insane not to feel ANY stress, panic, boredom, isolation, or apprehension on maternity leave, but to my surprise and delight, those emotions have all stayed on the subclinical side of the fence for me.

This, I think, is due to a number of factors: an awesome, pain-free birth experience; a supportive partner; a good sense of what my emotional needs are and how to fulfill them. But most important (seriously): my iPhone.

I’m not sure how mothers stayed sane before smartphones were invented. My phone has been my lifeline to the outside world, keeping me connected to friends and family and books and media even when I’m alone in the house and all I have to spare is one thumb.

If you’re about to go on maternity leave yourself, know that it’s not necessarily going to be horrific…or a breeze. Most of the women I know, myself included, think it’s going to be one of the two, and I for one was surprised.

What it’s most likely to be is a combination of horrific and breezy -- I mean, both of those things at the same time. It’s a six- to fourteen-week fiesta of paradoxes.

How is it possible to be so in love with my baby, so desperate not to leave him, and yet simultaneously so bored? Why am I miserable at the prospect of returning to work if I know this diminished routine of sleeping, sitting, babbling, and sitting some more won’t be psychologically sustainable for me in the long run?

It makes no sense. That, I would say, is maternity leave in a nutshell: it makes no sense.

Last month, after 38 long, miserable weeks of pregnancy, I gave birth via elective c-section. It seemed like a tough choice at the time, but in retrospect, I’m wildly happy I did it—so happy, in fact, that if I ever have another kid, the only way you will catch me giving birth out my vag is if it’s in the back of a taxi on the way to the operating room.

30 minutes or so after my c-section.

Having a Caesarean was never a part of my birth plan. The reason for that is that I never had a birth plan. Terrified by all of my options for getting my baby from uterus to open air, I made the mature decision to bury my head in the sand and shout “whatever you think is best!” at my doctors during all of my third-trimester appointments.

All I cared about was the drugs. I wanted all of them. (I have what you would call a low pain threshold.)

Game day came sooner than expected. At the beginning of my 38th week, I developed preeclampsia, a condition that the Downton Abbey fans among you will recognize as life-threatening. In late pregnancy, the treatment is immediate delivery. I had to make a choice: induced vaginal labor, starting that night, or a c-section.

According to that article and pretty much every other reputable one you’ll find online, vaginal labor is medically preferable. C-sections are serious procedures that come with longer recovery times and increased—if unlikely—risks. They reduce vaginal trauma, of course, and they lower your chances of short-term problems like incontinence. But they also increase your risk of REALLY serious complications, such as blood clots and death.

With this information in mind, I decided that I wanted to try induced vaginal labor. (Who wouldn’t?) But once I got to the hospital, that plan lasted for about six seconds.

Remember when I said I had a low pain threshold? Yeah, I screamed when the doctor on duty did a cervical exam to see if I was dilated yet. A cervical exam. It was about as painful as an enthusiastic Pap smear, but it was already more than I could handle.

I wasn’t really dilated yet, so they started me on a dilation drug called Cervidil. One of the side effects was mild cramping, and this too caused me to break down and cry. Many of you experience far worse every month during your period. Not me! I’m a wimp.

Hours later, I was supposed to start Pitocin, the real-deal drug that would induce contractions. Instead, I summoned the doctor back to my delivery room for a Serious Talk About my Options.

Reader, I pussed. Or rather, in literal terms, I did the opposite: I decided that no puss was going to be harmed in the birth of my child.

Of course, I kid. This was not a decision I made lightly. There were medically compelling reasons for me to go under the knife: a high chance the induction would fail; a big-headed baby and a narrow pelvic opening. But also—and in my opinion, just as important—there were my feelings.

My #1 priority was a healthy baby, but escaping pain was a close second. As was maintaining my sanity. A can-do attitude is important to natural childbirth, and I was just so batshit terrified that I didn’t think I’d have the presence of mind to push or breathe through contractions. By the time my doctor and I finished our conversation, the right answer was clear to both of us.

You know that moment in "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" when the sun rises, and Aragorn looks to the east like Gandalf told him too, and BOOM, there he is with the Rohirrim, charging to the rescue? My c-section was like that for me, for the following reasons:

1. It was completely—completely—painless. I’d thought that the epidural might hurt going in, but even that was no more painful than your average blood test, thanks to my anesthesiologist’s liberal use of local anesthetic.

2. With two veteran surgeons, a nurse, an assistant, two neonatologists, and an anesthesiologist in the room, I felt beyond reassured. I was so relaxed and confident in their abilities that I was able to joke around with my husband for the entire procedure.

3. I had heard recovery would be difficult, but honestly…no. At least not for me. With rest and Percocet, it was tiddlywinks. I felt a few twinges of pain around my incision site for about 2 weeks afterward, but those are long gone now.

4. I had also heard it was tougher to bond with your baby after the procedure because you couldn’t get immediate skin-to-skin time. (Babies delivered via c-section need to be put under a warmer and examined immediately.) That didn’t really bother me—we were skin-to-skin within the hour, and we’ve certainly bonded since.

5. I was freaked out about what the scar would look like, but that ended up being another pleasant surprise. Right now, it looks like I got drunk in Tijuana and decided to get a small vanilla bean tattooed across my lower abdomen. Eventually, it’ll fade to white.

Today, I’m the mother of a beautiful baby boy, yet I have no idea what labor feels like. That doesn’t make me feel unhappy, or like less of a woman: it makes me want to run around in circles, screaming with relief. I win! I win! I win!

Not all the c-section veterans I know feel the same way. Three of the four people closest to me who’ve recently given birth have had the procedure, and their feelings about it run the gamut from glee to grief.

“I had a traumatic birth experience,” my 28-year-old friend Mary* wrote to me over email. “I was full on ‘natural’ birth…ever since high school, when I got very passionate about women’s health. For me, I saw birthing with midwives and a doula as a feminist action—it was important to take back women’s health care from a male-dominated field.”

Mary’s plan went awry when her medically-necessary induction failed, requiring an unscheduled c-section after 8 hours of hideously painful labor and pushing. (Inductions fail about 40% of the time.)

“As soon as I was hooked up to an IV, something in me gave up, and I felt like a patient in a hospital rather than an active participant,” she wrote.

As Mary’s friend, I’m disappointed that her birth didn’t go the way she wanted—but I’m also intrigued, because our feelings are mirror opposites. I loved my thoroughly-medicated birth for the same reasons she wanted an unmedicated one.

For me, getting a Caesarean felt like a feminine victory—a glorious reclaiming of agency and control from the jaws of a terrifying ordeal that has killed millions and millions of women over the millennia and probably would have killed me in an earlier age. It made me feel the same way I did when I went on the Pill for the first time: like I was no longer a slave to my biology.

My Caesarean also struck me as a huge privilege. I feel so lucky to live at a time and in a place where excellent medical care is available. And as someone who had no maternity coverage whatsoever for the first 5 months of pregnancy, I am grateful to have nabbed last-minute insurance that allowed me to spend 4 days in the hospital, recovering in the presence of nurses and lactation consultants.

These days, a Caesarean delivery doesn’t preclude vaginal childbirth in subsequent pregnancies. Women who wish to do so are welcome to try VBAC—vaginal birth after Caesarean. But I won’t be one of them. My c-section liberated me from my fear of childbirth, and from some of my body’s most dangerous vicissitudes.

The last time I attempted a normal-sized dinner was about a month ago. I went to a diner and had their house specialty: challah French toast with bacon and maple syrup. Who doesn’t love breakfast for dinner?! Mmm.

I went to bed at 9pm, a happy girl. Then, about an hour later, I woke up choking -- literally choking -- on Mrs. Butterworth’s-flavored bile.

Gasping for air, I lurched upright, belch-vomiting a sticky globule of Metro 29 Diner all over my husband’s and my duvet. The force of this caused stomach acid to shoot into my nose and pee to sally forth into my pajamas.

"OH GOD, GET UP, GET UP," I wailed at my husband, speed-waddling down the hall to the bathroom as he awoke from his pleasant dreams into what I’d unleashed all around him.

For the next 20 minutes, as Matt quietly balled our bedclothes into the laundry machine, I sat weeping on the toilet, burping bits of partially-digested challah into the trash can as my bladder emptied itself in angry little flourishes.

Needless to say, I no longer eat big meals after 2 pm.

At this point in my pregnancy -- week 36 -- I feel like I should make pro bono visits to local high schools, because I am walking birth control. I've gained 55 pounds, mostly in my face and ankles (or at least that’s what it feels like). I have to work flat on my back or standing DJ-style at my desk, as sitting up for more than 10 minutes causes searing pain in my spinal cord.

Every night, I sleep terribly, snoring so hard that my throat gets sore and drooling so much that I give myself a mucous facial. I’m usually in bed for eight or nine hours, but with five mandatory bathroom breaks, I’m only getting about six hours’ sleep. My nipples have begun leaking colostrum -- a moist, yellow pre-milk substance that stains my tank tops -- and my sinuses are closed for business. A good poop is as elusive and magical as a leprechaun.

And then there are the contractions. Until I got pregnant, I never realized that your uterus contracts all the time during the second half of pregnancy, usually starting sometime in the second trimester. About 5-10 times a day, I get the sense that my baby has grabbed hold of my uterus and is trying to burrito himself in it. It’s not labor -- they’re Braxton Hicks contractions, sort of practice runs for the main event -- but they sure are uncomfortable.

What horrifies me is that all of the symptoms above are normal. I do have some minor pregnancy complications -- which might send me into labor any day now, yippee! -- but they’re painless. All of the really annoying stuff is typical for late-stage pregnancy.

Not every woman feels these symptoms. The other day, I ran into an older work acquaintance in our office kitchen. She asked me how I was doing. I gave her an abridged but honest answer: I’m looking forward to the baby, but holy hell am I ready for the baby-gestating to be over.

“Really?” she said, staring dreamily into her memories as she washed her Tupperware. “I just LOVED being pregnant.”

I wanted to murder her.

Which brings me to the topic of my current emotional state. Murderous rage is just one of the many special, special feelings I am having every day. Weepiness is another one; my long-suffering husband had to hold me through a crying jag the other day after I saw pictures of myself and my upper arms at last weekend’s baby shower. (Said crying jag ended in more burp-vomiting.)

Don't get me wrong: I'm not depressed. Most of the time, I’m padding through life in a congenial, confused fog, bumbling my words and taking three hours to do work tasks that normally take me 30 minutes. I feel like little elves have removed half of my brain and commingled the rest of it with JIF peanut butter. But I'm vaguely content.

A couple of unexpected blessings steel me through the darker moments. The first are what I call the Manic Hours: chunks of time in which I get an unexpected surge of energy. I never know when they’re going to come or what I’ll be able to do with them, and I have no clue how long they’re going to be around. But they're amazing.

Abruptly and without warning -- usually at some point post-dinner -- I become possessed by the urge to clean my house, call repairmen to come fix all the broken or breaking appliances, ball up clutter to send to the Salvation Army, pay bills, and cross off every item on my to-do list. I feel like I’ve taken a fistful of my ADHD meds, although my actual prescription bottle remains untouched since last winter.

During one Manic Hour this week, I wrote, addressed, and stamped more than 30 thank-you notes, walked them to the mailbox, and then folded three loads of laundry. I’m writing this column during another one now.

Sources from the internet to my dog-eared copy of "What to Expect When You’re Expecting" warn me that neurotic cleaning urges are a sign of impending labor. They’re part of what’s called the “nesting instinct,” and they indicate that the Cervical Olympics are nigh. I guess that should make me nervous, but I’m honestly so excited to have any energy at all that I don't really care what it means.

Another delightful surprise is that I’m fiscally solvent for the first time in years. To shock and delight, I’ve unearthed myself from credit card debt over the course of this pregnancy -- and I was thousands and thousands of dollars in the hole at the beginning.

This achievement has a lot to do with a couple of big commission checks I got at work. But it doesn’t hurt that I’ve spent the past few months too knocked up to drink, too tired to go out, too big to fit into most clothing, and too afraid of indigestion to eat at restaurants. Just as my prepregnancy clothes are sitting sadly in my closet, waiting to play next year, my dollars are sitting in my bank account. And it feels good.

Of course, I’ll shortly have to worry about paying for a baby. And delivering a baby. And making sure the baby knows how loved he is and feels safe. But I have to say, if there’s one thing the third trimester really does prepare you for, it’s the unpredictable future.

Given the choice between leaping out into the unknown and languishing forever in the land of burp vomit, I know in a heartbeat what I’d pick -- and I suspect that’s just what Nature intended.

In my industry -- literary agenting -- it’s the first cliché you learn: don’t represent poetry. It’s commercial poison. Readerships are tiny, advances even tinier. After hours and hours prepping and negotiating a poetry book deal, we agents might make enough commission to take ourselves out for Endless Shrimp at Red Lobster, but chances are we won’t even get that much.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Just the other day, a major New York publisher -- Little, Brown -- bought a poetry collection from Kevin Powers, whose novel The Yellow Birds was a big bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award. And earlier this summer, Doubleday published David Rakoff’s beautiful, posthumous novel-in-verse.

However, if you’re not in that literary stratosphere in which editors publish whatever the fuck you do because you’re Just So Great, fuggedaboutit.

As a former grad student in English literature, I am depressed by this. I love poetry. It’s like Adderall to me, in that it’s something I regularly ingest to bring my thoughts and feelings into sharper focus.

It might be Pollyannaish of me to hope that I can bolster the poetry market in one post, but I know there are others of you out there who love poetry as much as I do and want to support the people writing it. So can we have a poetry swap? You tell me what underappreciated living poets I should be reading, and I’ll tell you about a few my friends and I love?

I’d like to concentrate on women poets for two reasons:

This is xoJane.

In my casual observation, women are as underrepresented in the canon of Great Contemporary Poetry as they are in Great Contemporary Literature. For instance, since the Library of Congress started calling its poetry consultants “Poet Laureate” in 1986, there have been 14 male Poet Laureates and only 5 female. That's ridiculous.

Relatively well known in the UK, Greenlaw doesn’t have as much of a following here in the States. She should. I discovered her in a grad-school course on the relationship of poetry and science, and she’s been one of my favorite poets ever since.

Quoted by the Library of Congress as saying “The poem…has to be as tightly constructed as any scientific hypothesis,” she writes poems of alienation and longing in precise metaphors borrowed from astronomy, medicine, and other scientific fields. Reading her work, I feel like someone has taken my most intimate emotions and given them both physical substance and galactic significance.

Check our Night Photograph, Greenlaw’s first big collection, to see what I mean: “I meet my brother in a bar / and he shows me a piece of outer space: / six degrees by six degrees / a fragment stuffed with galaxies. / He explains how you get pairs of stars / that pull each other into orbit, / forever unable to touch or part….”

This one came to me via recommendation from my friend Liz, 29, who loves the Palestinian-American poet “for the feeling of outsider-ness she captures.”

Like Greenlaw, Shihab Nye explores the relationship between intimate, personal longing and something physical and shared: in this case, ethnic displacement.

See her poem “Two Countries” for a particularly vivid example of this: “Skin remembers how long the years grow / when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel / of singleness, feather lost from the tail / of a bird, swirling onto a step, / swept away by someone who never saw that it was a feather.”

Justifiably famous throughout North America, the Canadian Carson was introduced to me by another friend: Caitlin, 28.

Carson’s two most famous books, Autobiography of Red and Red Doc, “are novels in verse, so prose readers have a plot and characters to latch onto,” Caitlin wrote to me. “Autobio has a queer following, and much of it is about impossible longing -- the myth of Geryon is that Heracles kills him, [and] Geryon the character falls immediately in love with Heracles.”

Caitlin continued, “But there's another element to Geryon's queerness; he's a red winged monster, and it's at times ambiguous whether we are supposed to read this metaphorically. Because I don't feel like I fit neatly into even a marginalized subgroup, the compounded queerness appeals to me -- the sense that there may or may not be something the matter.”

Reading Caitlin’s email, I was reminded of a quote from Alan Bennett’s play “History Boys”: “The best moments in reading are when you come across something…which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else…. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

Moss, professor at the University of Michigan and former MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, might be better described as a multimedia experimentalist than a poet these days. Her work explores interacting systems of language and sensory input.

Although I’m not as familiar with her avant-garde stuff, I love some of the traditional poetry she's written, which -- can you see a theme in what I like to read?! -- couches intimate observations on identity and alienation in metaphors of music and the natural world.

Take a look at some of her best poems here. My favorite is “Tornados” (sic): “Truth is, I envy them / not because they dance; I out jitterbug them / as I’m shuttled through and through legs / strong as looms, weaving time. They do black more justice than I, frenzy / of conductor of philharmonic and electricity, hair / on end, result of the charge when horns and strings release / the pent up Beethoven and Mozart. Ions played / instead of notes.”

I’m so glad that my friend Stephanie, 30 reminded me earlier this week of this brilliant, justifiably famous Pulitzer Prize winner. (Stephanie herself is publishing a book next year, and it's going to be awesome.)

Olds' "language is so vivid, and the emotion she captures so authentic,” Stephanie wrote. “She goes for blood and guts. Reading her work is invigorating.”

She continued, “she is often criticized as confessional, as if writing about women’s experience is gossip instead of considering the human condition. She writes a lot about family, and motherhood, without being removed or maudlin.”

Stephanie pointed me toward “The Language of the Brag,” Olds’ absolutely amazing poem about childbirth, which has become my rallying cry as I waddle through my last trimester of pregnancy.

As I waddle toward the home plate of pregnancy -- 32 weeks down, 8 to go, but who’s counting -- there’s a lot I should be thinking about: birth plans, kick counts, nanny shares, breastfeeding classes, preparations for maternity leave. Heck, my husband and I haven’t even settled on a name yet.

All of these things deserve much more attention than the fact that I’ve gained 50 pounds. All of them. But on the Monopoly board of my mind, guess who’s buying up all the goddamn hotels? Vanity. I can’t stop thinking about how unattractive I am, and I’m so mad at myself for caring.

My friend Louise,* the 30-year-old mother of a toddler, added a lovely new one in an email to me today: “Weight means everything’s working. I’m not Dr. Science, but I think you need it for after the baby’s born. Fuel for healing and breastfeeding and to compensate for missed meals when you’re too distracted or busy to eat.”

She’s right, I know. But no matter how many reassurances I string together, I feel like they’re doing nothing for me.

I never know when one offhand look or comment is going to send me into a tailspin of self-loathing. There was the time I asked my doctor if I should be concerned about my weight gain. Looking me up and down, she said that maternal obesity could definitely cause health problems with my baby, “but I don’t -- think -- you’re quite there.”

She wasn’t trying to be cute. For the first time in my life, someone was truly stopping to consider whether or not I was obese. It shouldn’t have scared the shit out of me, but it did.

Then there was the moment last week when a man who works on my floor passed me in the hallway. Always reliable for a friendly “How are you?” in the past, this time he opted for a curt nod.

Immediately afterward, he passed a cute assistant whose desk is near mine.

“Jill! How are you?” he said with a grin, and my heart sank.

Just typing this makes my skin crawl with embarrassment -- why the hell do I care that a random co-worker declined to smile at me, a married woman in her third trimester of pregnancy? -- but the truth is smiles like that have been a bedrock of my self-esteem since adolescence. I thought I had escaped such triviality by growing up and finding unconditional love with my husband and family, but apparently not.

Until I got pregnant, I didn’t realize just how greedily I’d been drinking from the steady stream of feedback all women receive on their appearance (whether we welcome it or not). I think that’s because the feedback I received was largely subliminal and positive: a lingering smile from a barista here, and a sales assistant eager to help me find the perfect cocktail party dress there. I wasn’t modelesque by any means, but I was 5’8”, blonde, and built like a well-sunned dairymaid. It all went down so easy.

Pregnancy shoved me off my little island of privilege.

The stream of feedback is still there -- oh, is it ever -- but now it’s constant, rushing, loud, overt. At least twice a day, someone will point at my stomach and say, “Yikes, how much longer has he GOT in there?” Well-meaning relatives will gasp at my swollen ankles and demand that I lie down and elevate them immediately. People who haven’t seen me in months will bug their eyes when I come into view, exclaiming, “WOW! You look different!”

All women live in a world where their bodies are treated as public property -- up for discussion, evaluation, judgment -- but there’s something about a pregnant body that really makes people let their guard down.

This is true whether or not the woman in question has gained a lot of weight. Of her own pregnancy, Louise wrote to me, “I gained very little weight, related to [medical complications]. And, oh, the praise I received! I was so small! I only carried in my belly! I didn’t look pregnant from behind!”

She continued, “It really pissed me off. I had no control over how much weight I gained. It was, at times, a medical concern. I mean, yes, I’m not going to lie, it was nice that baby weight wasn’t an issue. But I don’t like people assessing my body, even if it’s in a positive way. Fuck that.”

I wish I were as self-possessed as Louise. I wish I could wave away the critical voices inside and out of my head with a simple fuck-it. I don’t know what makes me feel uglier: the weight gain itself, or the realization that so much of my self esteem, my pride, still comes from external validation of my looks. But both of them sure do make me feel ugly.

As I type this, my son is kick-kick-kicking into my ribcage, his little knees cresting every so often in the ridge above my belly button. This is the one part of my body in which I still take an unequivocal delight. I can't wait to hold him in my arms.

I'm sad this joy is even somewhat diminished by my body issues. I'm sadder still to confess this: I didn’t think I had a gender preference for the baby, but right now, I’m grateful to be having a boy. Pregnancy has made me realize how much more I need to grow in my own self-confidence as a woman before I'm ready to raise one in this culture.

Of all the ways that pregnancy has challenged my self-image so far, the one I've found most troubling is this: It's made me viscerally disgusted with the idea of abortion, particularly after the first trimester.

Seeing my unborn son on his 12-week ultrasound shocked me. He was already such an obvious person: gesticulating his arms, opening and closing his mouth, turning away grumpily whenever the technician poked him. The idea that babies at this gestational age were anything less than alive -- that they are nothing more than proto-human organic tissue -- suddenly seemed ridiculous to me.

As someone who (obviously) writes about feminist topics for a national website, I faced a crossroads here. Should I run out and Tell The World What I'd Learned? Should I change my intellectual and political stance on abortion, now that my emotions were tugging me in the opposite direction? Was it mature and evolved of me to advocate in public for one morality, when in private I now adhered to another -- or was it a form of cowardice?

If you're hoping I decided it was cowardice: wah-wah. My intellect won.

I know the limits of my understanding of this particular issue -- and of other people’s lives in general. I also believe that government should not be in the business of dispensing medical opinion. Whatever cognitive dissonance now exists between all this and my own personal feelings about abortion, I believe it is nobody's burden to bear but my own.

Thinking my way out of this moral quandary, however, brought me to some even bigger questions. For those of us who identify as feminists, what is the appropriate relationship between private morality and public advocacy? Should I divorce all of my emotional experience from my intellectual beliefs, the way I do now with abortion?

If the personal is political, as the second-wave feminist cliché goes, then it seems like a betrayal of the cause to perform any one belief system in public while living out a different one in private. On the other hand, I just can’t get behind telling other women they need to do what I do and feel how I feel, even though my lifestyle choices work just fine for me.

Hopefully this was not actually what my cousins were thinking as I put on my earrings.

As my friend Gemma*, a 27-year-old Londoner, pointed out to me in an email, the conflation of personal and political is what produces some of the worst antifeminist writing out there -- particularly about marriage and family.

“Mummy logic,” she called it. “Anti-female journalism…basically hinges on one principle: you know you should think one way, but when it comes to YOUR family/your kids, you can’t help but think another.” You just want to let everybody know, because you not-so-subtly believe that the best advice is what you can’t help but think.

In Gemma’s opinion, Mummy Logic has led to the entire “so-help-me-girls-I’m-gonna-be-the-one-to-say it school of journalism.” Examples include Princeton Mom’s infamous letter and even some of the work of Caitlin Moran, who indulged in some embarrassing rape apologetics in an interview with Australian blog Mama Mia last year.

Here’s what Moran said in that interview: “When I’m lying in bed at night with my husband, I know there’s a woman coming who I could rape and murder, because I can hear her coming up the street in high heels, clack-clack-clack. And I can hear she’s on her own, I can hear what speed she’s coming at, I could plan where to stand to grab her or an ambush. And every time I hear her I think, ‘Fuck, you’re just alerting every fucking nutter to where you are now.’”

Aside from my general disgust that Moran would even sort of blame a hypothetical rape victim for what she was wearing, I’m struck by the symbolism of the scene she describes. From the safety of her marital bed, she lobs judgment at a single woman making her way up the street.

It’s the essence of what partnered women are doing when they indulge in Mummy Logic: oozing benevolent concern from a platform of privilege and security. And it’s almost as gross as this post would be if I'd written it all about The Time I Saw My Baby On An Ultrasound And Realized That Abortion Is Gross, Girls.

Mummy Logic is at the heart of much antifeminist writing. I know this. That said, I still haven’t figured out whether it’s possible for married/childrearing writers like me to combine the personal and political in an effective way. Whether we include our personal lives in our writing or leave them out, nearly all of us will find someone who finds that decision obnoxious or hypocritical.

In the comments section of my last post -- a discussion of whether it was a good thing to get married in one’s 20’s -- one woman accused me and several other feminist writers (e.g. Lesley, Emily, and Jezebel’s Tracie Egan Morrissey) of misleading younger women like her. She was annoyed that we had all -- at various points, and for various reasons -- expressed skepticism about monogamous relationships, even as we happily participated in such relationships ourselves.

“All of this nonsense is one of the many reasons I’ve become so disillusioned with third-wave feminism,” she wrote. “It’s always the married (or at least the non-single) women trying to convince younger singles that hookup culture is awesome….conventional women trying to seem more interesting than they are and throwing millennials under the bus in the interest of ideals that are abstract for them but real for us.”

The last line of her comment stung me: “I’d love to have a relationship, but married women are the ones telling men that it’s okay to fuck and run.”

As tempted as I was to argue with this commenter about her takeaway, the important thing was that she had this takeaway. She felt personally victimized by married/“conventional” women writers, and she felt we were polluting the waters of feminist discourse with ideas and suggestions that had no basis in our personal reality.

I guess you could say she was accusing us of the opposite of Mummy Logic. At the intersection of How I Should Feel and How I Honestly Feel When It Comes to My Family, we had taken a left where Mummy Logic takes a right, and the result appears to have been equally unsatisfying.

I’m left unsure of how to evolve as a writer. Is it worse to risk alienating women by putting undue emphasis on personal experience, or to risk misleading them in an attempt not to be judgmental? In feminism today, is there any value in the old “personal is political” rallying cry?

Have you heard? Susan “Princeton Mom” Patton just signed a book deal with a major New York publisher. The news made me sad, but not for the reasons you’d think.

In case you’ve forgotten, Patton is the Princeton alumna who wrote into the Daily Princetonian in March, urging women to “Find a husband on campus before you graduate…you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.” Oh, and PS: “I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians….My younger son is a junior[,] and the universe of women he can marry is limitless.” (Act fast, ladies.)

I’m not surprised that Patton got a book deal. This kind of controversy sells: see such titles as "The Rules" and "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough." A publishing professional myself, I know that signing her was a smart business decision.

What made me sad was my own elitist reaction to the deal -- particularly to the comments left on Jezebel’s post about it. Boo. I hate being reminded of what a judgey little troll I am.

One comment in particular did it for me. A woman from the Midwest wrote in that she already felt like an old maid at 28.

“I am not saying ALL women need to get married, or that you should be shamed or pressured into dating when you’re not ready,” she said. “But IF marriage is a goal of yours, it seems like it’s a lot smarter to lock that down early, so you can spend your twenties building your career without worrying over your slowly declining fertility.”

I (and many commenters) reacted with disgust. How could any young person say that? Hadn’t she read the recent piece in the Atlantic about how women stay fertile a lot longer than we think, and fertility statistics are based on data from 18th century France? Why wasn’t she concerned that women who marry in their twenties might be limiting themselves professionally and personally?

Left out of my judge-gasm was the fact that I am in my twenties and married. I got married at 27 to a man I’ve been dating since I was 23. For Pete’s sake, I’m about to have a baby with him. And yet -- as a reflex -- I thought this woman was a little pathetic for wanting what I had. Why?

The truth is that I harbor a truckload of cognitive dissonance about my marriage and growing family. I’m simultaneously thrilled and terrified about them. One minute I’m fighting back tears of joy, lying in bed with my husband, singing Johnny Cash duets to our unborn son as we feel his little kicks; the next minute I’m clicking through old Facebook photos from my time carousing through Europe, my heart sinking under the knowledge that I will never be able to do that again. I feel like I’ve failed to Maximize My 20’s.

When I waddle around town in my pregnancy muumuus, the only comment I dread hearing more than “My God, you’re HOW far away from your due date?” is this one: “Wow, you’re young to be having children.” I’ve heard it more than once, and it fills me with the same FOMO that people like Princeton Mom seem to regard as the exclusive provenance of single women. What am I missing by living this way? And what must other people think?

I know that 28 is not young in most of the country (and world). But I also grew up upper-middle-class on the East Coast. Of the 70-odd women who were in my private girls’ school’s Class of 2003, maybe 10 of us are now married. Just one other classmate -- a devout Christian -- has kids.

The vast majority of our parents, too, started families in their thirties or later. In this community, being a 28-year-old married preggo is unusual, if not outright weird. Anxious by nature, I've always had trouble owning my life's decisions without comparing myself to others. And the majority of my peers are doing different things with young adulthood.

People like me occupy a privileged niche of American society, but it’s the same niche Princeton Mom addresses when she speaks of the “‘politically correct’ world where topics of marriage and motherhood are taboo.” What angers me about her attitude is that she thinks all of us “educated girls” will stop being miserable if we quit our whining and bag our college boyfriends. The truth is, marriage isn’t a cure-all for bourgeois existential anxiety. Whether or not we’re wearing a ring, almost all of us are insecure and looking over our shoulders.

In Gmail discussions, friends from a similar background -- married and single -- mirrored my contradictory feelings about young marriage.

“I do think that people look down on women who find their husbands early, like they’re somehow less evolved, less adventurous, or settling -- when some of them just lucked out and met someone they clicked with early on,” said Kara Baskin, a 34-year-old journalist who married at 27.

“I’m a little worried that I’ll get married too young,” said Mary, a 24-year-old in a new relationship. “Part of the fear comes from the shame felt for wanting something you don’t think you’re supposed to want: domesticity, protected living, STAYING AT HOME WITH BABIES.”

Not everyone seemed troubled by the idea of a “right” age for marriage. Angela, 26, has no qualms about her desire to get married to her fiancé. “I always assumed I’d get married in my mid/late 20’s,” she told me, although “I never felt like I would be failing if I didn’t.”

Nevertheless, Angela admitted to feeling left out recently when a couple of single co-workers bonded with each other and not her, even though the 3 of them had plenty in common. One of them explained to her that it was just easier to spend time with women who were single by choice.

Meanwhile, 28-year-old Leigh is beginning to ponder marriage with her boyfriend of two years and has mixed feelings. “Since I’ve spent most of my life convinced that no worthwhile man would ever want to be with me (hello, major emotional hang-ups!), I am somewhat surprised, and -- if we’re being completely honest -- relieved,” she wrote to me. But: “Am I happy that I actually feel relieved to be in a relationship in which marriage is…a possibility? Definitely not.”

Married or single, nearly all of us are tied in emotional knots. Hooray for us.

My friend Erin -- 30 now, 25 when she got married, and 27 when she had her first baby -- has a cogent explanation for all this: “Patriarchy. We live in a society that is still freaking out about equality for women. (See: TX, NC, OH.) Susan Faludi wrote Backlash in 1991, and it’s still totally relevant.”

She continues, “That’s how you get the lies about single 35-year-old women being more likely to die in a terrorist attack than get married, and your eggs disintegrating when you turn 27. (Flat out incorrect.) …So much negativity -- it’s impossible to be a woman and get everything right. We internalize that, we judge ourselves, we judge each other. Like the Mommy Wars. Oh god you guys, wait until you get to the Mommy Wars!”

Rare as young married women might be in my part of the country, it’s rarer still to meet a woman of any relationship status who’s 100% comfortable in her choices. That’s why people like Princeton Mom have the power to make national headlines and get big book deals: We’re all floundering in a swamp of self-doubt.

Before I got knocked up last winter, I always wondered if I would “just know” when it happened. Would I continue about my business, oblivious to the new life inside me until the day I missed my period? Or would there be SIGNS?

The answer is yes. Yes, there were all sorts of signs, starting about 7 days after conception. And yes, I nevertheless managed to bumble along until week 4 with no idea I was pregnant, because the symptoms of pregnancy can be so much weirder and more diverse than they tell you in sex ed classes and on TV.

Here’s what happened to me right away: the aurora borealis. On my boobs. I took off my pajama top one morning to discover they were covered in neon blue veins that hadn’t been there before. My nipples had also turned brown, as if they’d snuck away to L.A. Tan in the middle of the night.

I’ll admit, I spent a lot of time staring at my boobs in the mirror, Double Rainbow-style (“What does it MEAN?”). But since I hadn’t been trying to get pregnant, the right answer just didn’t dawn on me.

Around the same time -- again, about a week after conception -- I got a toothache. I bit into a caramel, and the flood of sugar caused such agonizing pain in one of my teeth that I booked a dental appointment, certain I had a cavity.

And then there was my voice. I started telling people I was pregnant around week 10, because I’m terrible about sitting on news like this. When I told one of my clients the news over the phone, she responded, “Of course! You already have the pregnancy voice!”

The pregnancy voice? Yep, it’s a thing, attested to by dozens of women on pregnancy message boards. Thanks to a combination of persistent indigestion and rhinitis of pregnancy -- coldlike symptoms caused by estrogen-inflamed mucous membranes all over the nose and chest -- I and many other preggos spend our days sounding like hung-over airline pilots, all sniffles and vocal fry.

The surprises didn’t stop there. Five months along now, I’ve also enjoyed the following surprisingly common yet little-known side effects:

1. Waking up one morning covered in an itchy rash, convinced I had somehow rubbed a cat or macadamia nuts all over myself, because I am allergic to both of those things. Nope! Pregnancy symptom.

2. Nightly, psychedelic nightmares about bleeding to death and elaborate, borderline-erotic daytime fantasies about chocolate-frosted birthday cake. Vivid nightmares and daydreams: also common.

3. Peeing a little every time I sneeze. On an unfortunately related note: horrible chub rub.

4. A sense of smell so supercharged that even a little BO, emitted from a distance of 40-50 feet, hits my nostrils like a 40-part Renaissance motet of disgusting.

My list of symptoms is long and colorful. But here are two things it doesn’t include: morning sickness and weird cravings, both of which I’d internalized as requisite to the experience. I’m one of the lucky 1 in 4 women who breezes through her first trimester with nary a dry heave, and although my love for all things Pillsbury has dramatically intensified in these past few months, my sweet tooth has been with me for decades.

Every woman experiences pregnancy differently, but at least among my friends, the overarching theme has been one of surprise. Pregnancy has been *so* different than the impression we had when we were footloose and fetus-free, and the effects on our bodies so much more varied and strange.

My 28-year old friend Lara* tells me that for most of her third trimester, she was able to manipulate her grossly swollen ankles like Play-Doh. (They actually held their sculpted shape for a few seconds!) Then she developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, which apparently a lot of pregnant women do. WTF?

But it wasn't all bad. After living her whole life with ADD, Lara was pleased to discover in her second trimester that she got a rush of energy and focus, “like I was actually experiencing life without ADD.” This is similar to something my non-ADD mom also rhapsodized about, telling me that in her second trimester she felt the healthiest and most energetic she had ever been in her life.

Lara says her euphoria went away in her third trimester. I’m jealous she got to experience it at all. My energy levels and ADD symptoms have gotten much, much worse -- thanks in part to not being able to take my meds. Most nights, I’m still so exhausted that I have to be in bed by 9pm. But Lara isn’t exceptional in what she experienced -- many women do feel a wave of euphoria around weeks 12-14.

Meanwhile, 30-year-old Erin, another friend of mine, spent much of her second trimester dizzy and/or fainting. The list of symptoms she Gmailed to me included “food aversions” (with four emoticon frowny faces) and also “sudden enjoyment of mediocre rom-coms,” which apparently didn’t go away until she stopped breastfeeding. She also says she was a “full on digestive disaster” and experienced cramps and contractions throughout pregnancy -- something I've had as well, much to my alarm in the early weeks.

Twenty-eight-year-old Gloria, a former coworker in her last trimester, hasn’t had as many surprises as the rest of us. She reports that she feels like a whale, escaped morning sickness, and has to pee pretty much constantly these days, but “all those are pretty typical symptoms.”

Nevertheless, she recently attended a childbirth class, and that development was a BIG surprise. “I’m not usually squeamish about medical stuff at all, but Jesus, it was intense! They passed around some of the instruments they use to speed up labor and went step by step through EVERY scenario of delivering a human. Luckily, I didn’t pass out….I only cried for about 20 minutes or so afterward.”

In unrelated news, I am becoming more and more confident every day in my decision to have the druggiest drug-assisted birth modern medicine has to offer. GO DRUGS!

Distilling these friends’ experiences and my own, what I’ve learned is that pregnancy is one of those things pop culture gets very, very wrong. (“It’s nothing compared to how ridiculously wrong it gets childbirth,” Erin chimes in, but I can’t speak to that yet -- eep.)

Sure, most women gain weight like it’s Monopoly money (although some don’t), and most women vomit at least once (although some don’t). But there are tons of other incredibly bizarre symptoms that you’ll never hear about unless you buy a ticket to the funhouse.

Knowing this in advance would have saved me a lot of needless worry, since due to the Internet being what it is, you can’t Google a single pregnancy symptom without reading some random message board post about how it’s 100% definitely a sign of miscarriage.

Twenty-two years have passed since the first time I saw “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” but there’s a scene in that movie I still can’t watch. I tried to do it on YouTube just now, but the best I could do was with one eye closed and the sound off.

If you’ve seen the movie, let me refresh your memory in three words: the cartoon shoe. (You can watch what I’m talking about here, although why would you want to?)

A sweet, puppy-like cartoon shoe snuggles up to the feet of the movie’s villain, Judge Doom. Then, without warning, he picks it up, carries it over to a vat full of acid, and slowly dips it to death. The shoe’s agonized screams become throttled whimpers as its mouth melts away. Ultimately, it’s reduced to dripping red goo on Judge Doom’s rubber glove.

That scene fucked me up when I was a kid.

My poor parents had no clue -- it was a PG-rated movie! Involving cartoon characters! -- so it was a staple rotation when babysitters and cousins came over. I sobbed the first time I saw it. From then on, I ran into the next room screaming and covered my ears whenever it was time for the shoe scene.

I admit it -- I’ve always been sensitive to these things. Even today, I plug my ears and make bovine noises of protest every time Theon Greyjoy gets tortured on “Game of Thrones.” But no amount of onscreen disemboweling can ever rival the amount of fear and grief I felt -- indeed, still feel -- about that scene in “Roger Rabbit” and few others I saw around the same time, including:

-And last but not least, "E.T." The entire movie. Something about that little guy just gave me the willies. I suppose if you had to pinpoint the moment when my terror actually became vomit, however, it'd be the mottled-and-dying-in-a-ditch scene.

To this day, these movies provide the stock images for almost all of my nightmares. I can't even think about them without shuddering. The same goes for a couple of books I read during those impressionable years.

When I was 9 or 10, I picked up Patricia Polacco's "Pink and Say," a picture book about two little boys who want to fight in the Civil War. Long story short, one of their moms is brutally murdered on the page. It ends with one of them getting hanged while the other starves in Andersonville Prison. I closed the book feeling like a bomb had gone off in my heart.

Also: who could forget Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell's "Scary Stories" trilogy? With those ILLUSTRATIONS. Christ.

A couple of years ago, in the bed of a tony Houston hotel, my sister got bitten on the thigh by a brown recluse spider. When she told me about the boil it created -- her voice loopy and a little slurred from painkillers -- I said, "At least it wasn't on your cheek?"

After a moment's silence, we both said "...like that GIRL! In the BOOK!" and jinxed each other. I don't think I need to elaborate for those of you who read "Scary Stories" at any point in your childhood, but lest you've forgotten:

I know I’m not the only one still traumatized by things like this. My friend “Laura,” a librarian in the UK, told me this: “I asked in my office, and EVERYONE ELSE said they can't see bunnies in the wild without thinking of horrific scenes from Watership Down (the movie) and feeling generally traumatized.”

A woman who works on my floor remembers cowering at “The Little Mermaid” when Ursula became huge and started cackling maniacally.

Another friend remembers being traumatized by “Cinderella,” but not so much because of “Cinderella” as because her father had forgotten that he’d recorded "Wild Orchid,” the 1989 Mickey Rourke soft-core pornography classic, on the same VHS tape. (“Needless to say, I have never bothered with Cinderella again but was pretty keen on Mickey Rourke,” she tells me.)

I apologize to all my fellow sensitive Sallies for making you wallow in these things. But I have a reason for bringing them up: I'm four and a half months pregnant, and I've begun to revisit everything I experienced as a child with the perspective of a clueless parent-to-be.

When my baby's ready to read picture books and watch movies, should I be on the lookout for scarring scenes like these? When is it appropriate to show kids stuff like this? Is it ever? Or would I be depriving him/her of something by withholding it?

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit" still makes me want to cry, but the "Scary Stories" books were always quietly thrilling for me -- just scary enough, like doing backflips off the highest bar on the jungle gym. How will I figure out where that boundary is with my kid?

The person who’s given me the most useful advice so far is not a parent, but a mortician.

Caitlin “Ask a Mortician” Doughty, my friend and literary client, reminded me that kids are capable of understanding much more than most adults think.

“Childhood is a relatively new concept,” she wrote to me. “This idea that children should be protected from any and all negative stimuli that might upset their innocent kid-soul is a modern one.”

She continued, “There is a difference between torture porn (i.e. the shoe's death…) and the death of Bambi's mother or Littlefoot's mother in A Land Before Time. [Oh, God, how could I have forgotten that one?!] Both of the latter films show that death is always a real possibility, but after you've been very sad for a while, it is possible to find a new family, one that you've chosen.”

Caitlin is right, and her insight helped me begin to draw lines around where I will stand as a parent. I don’t want to shield my kids from biological reality, or from art that celebrates the beauty of real (i.e., mortal) life.

Pink and Say, “Bambi,” and another kid’s movie a friend of mine just made me remember -- “Dumbo” -- are about the things that endure past death: strength, love, hope.

Roger Rabbit? Not so much. Needless to say, I will never be ordering that DVD off of Amazon.

I can’t tell you for sure whether the scary books and movies I took in as a kid scarred me for life, or I merely found them scary because I was always going to be the sort of person scared by things like that. What I can tell you is that I still haven’t forgiven Steven Spielberg for E.T.

What do you all think? When it comes to kids’ entertainment, where is the line between healthy, age-appropriate recognition of human mortality and -- as Caitlin calls it -- “torture porn?”

“Intellect,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “is a fire—rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is called man.” If this is so, one could call me smoldering, fluid, molten, burning with a thousand curiosities, tugged about by an anarchy of ideas.

I am a writer, a reader, and a photographer. I am a grammarian, a classicist, a knitter, a collector of old maps and blank books, a debater, a baker, an Anglophile, an artist, and a conservative. I am a greedy hoarder of trivial knowledge. I have a grand dream of growing up to be a protectress of obscure languages, strange facts, and forgotten stories. I have red toenails.

So began the admissions essay that got me into Columbia University back in 2003. Reading it today, I want to chiffonade my brains out.

Jesus Christ. “Protectress?” And the line about red toenails, which I distinctly remember as stolen from a 5-year-old Avon commercial starring Florence Griffith-Joyner. My limbs are instinctively curling into the fetal position.

I said in my admissions essay that I was going to be a protectress of obscure languages, but in the end I appear to have spent most of my freshman year dressed as an '80's hooker. Life: full of surprises!

Reading Noah’s defense, in which he calls himself a “cynical bastard” for some vaguely self-congratulatory reason, makes me want to breathe deeply into a paper bag. Ooooh, I bet he’s going to regret that in 10 years. But you know what? I also bet he’s going to be ridiculously successful.

As someone who edits high schoolers’ writing in my spare time, I’ve read a lot of terrible teenage prose through the years. College essays, in my experience, come in 3 varieties: pretentious, illiterate, or written by the parents. Most of them fall into column B.

Pretension is the best-case scenario, indicative if nothing else of a lively imagination. And if my friends’ lives are any indication, pretension appears to lurk in the past of almost every successful adult.

Take my friend Lilah,* now 25 and getting her JD at the University of Chicago. Lilah attended my high school, DC’s National Cathedral School for Girls, where she sang in the National Cathedral choir.

“Oh man, right up my alley with this one,” she wrote in response to my Gmail bat signal for stories. “I wrote [my college essay] about singing at Reagan’s funeral, and how noble I was for the fact that I wasn't allowing my distaste for his politics to affect my willingness to sing.”

She continued, “I really thought I was saying something profound. I really, really wasn't. The last line is:

We must be willing to talk to each other; to honor each other’s dead, and only then can we truly make progress. How can I bear to sing at Ronald Reagan’s funeral? By being open to the idea that a man can be great without agreeing with me."

Maud doesn’t want me to share details of where she went to college or all the amazing things she’s done since, but rest assured: She is a genius.

And there’s my friend Lynne, 28, a classmate of mine at Columbia. “My personal essay was about the Manet painting ‘Le dejeuner sur l'herbe,’” she wrote to me. “I totally claimed that I was the naked woman, because I was so open to life and experiences, while [all the people] around me were the two clothed dudes, scared to let their vulnerabilities show.”

Le dejeuner sur l'herbe

Lynne is now a high school English teacher. Reading the leaked Columbia essays on Jezebel last week filled her with dismay, but not for Noah and the other authors.

“The school where I teach is in a fairly low-income area,” she said. “Frankly, if any of those Columbia essays were turned in to my class, those students would receive an automatic A for the year. In terms of writing ability alone, they are so far above and beyond the writing I see on a daily basis that I can't even think of an appropriate metaphor.”

Which brings me to another important point about pretension: It doesn’t just signify imaginative capacity, it signifies privilege. (I’m not just talking about socioeconomic privilege, although one friend of mine did remind me of that cliché of all upper-middle-class clichés: the college essay describing one’s community service trip to Africa or the Caribbean.)

Kids who are pretentious have grown up around books. They’ve been allowed to indulge their intellectual curiosities, to be proud of their own ideas. Most importantly, they’ve been sheltered -- given the freedom to act their own age.

As Lynne reminded me in her email, teenagers are by nature intense.

“Right at this moment, I have a student sitting next to my desk writing an incident statement for our dean,” she told me. “What happened: she and her ex-girlfriend got in a verbal fight during lunch, during which she whacked her ex in the head with a plastic bag containing PE clothes. That's it. Her statement now appears to be on its fifth single-spaced, double sided notebook page (in pink pen). Seriously.”

Frankly, it’s sad for me to see a high school kid who’s not a little pretentious like little miss five-pager. Self-satisfaction is adolescence’s consolation prize. So much about that time of life is terrible; why knock teenagers for possessing one of the few things that isn’t?

As my friend Lilah says: “When you have ideas in high school, particularly intellectual ideas, or moral intuitions, it's the very first time you've ever thought about those things! And they feel like a fucking ray of perfect knowledge being beamed into your head: and only your head.”

I for one miss that sense of intellectual confidence. And as a literary agent, I wish that more competent adults had it today.

When I speak at writers’ conferences, I like to say that the published authors I know are not necessarily the most talented. They’re the Noah Samotins of the world: the ones who, regardless of innate talent, believe that their work is just a little more special than everyone else’s and that their ideas are just a little more original.

Of course, it takes a lot more than self-esteem to get your writing published, but unless you’re at least slightly demented with self-confidence, you don’t have a chance. As teenagers, most of us have it. As adults, most of us don’t.

My 29-year-old friend Rose, an Oxford graduate, wrote to me of how she sometimes tears up thinking of the passionate writer she used to be. “Maybe what I would write now is better for being more self conscious and tempered and aware of others. But I think there's definitely something sad about the loss of that intensity and passion.”

I agree. Most of us won't do amazing things with our lives. A few, however, will. And I guarantee you they won’t be the people snarking about “special little snowflakes” and “obnoxious little shits” who write imagined dialogues between themselves and Oscar Hammerstein. They’ll be the people who hear such insults and don’t care.

Two years ago, late on a Saturday night, my now-husband and I were dozing off in our bed when we heard a strange noise coming from downstairs. We tiptoed down to investigate, feeling stupid, whispering “It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s probably nothing.”

It turned out that no, a PCP-addled maniac was actually trying to break into our house.

Two months ago, I got pregnant by accident. My period was three hours late -- yes, old Utero is usually just that reliable -- so I decided it would a great idea to “calm myself down” with a pregnancy test from Rite Aid. My boss heard the news before pretty much anyone except my husband, because there was no other way to explain why I ran out the door weeping at 1 pm and didn’t come back.

These events had two things in common. First, both were my worst nightmares come true. (Another nightmare: my child finding this article on Google someday. Hi honey! Mommy loves you. Please read this through until the end.)

In this picture from Inauguration weekend, I am 2 days pregnant and obliviously drinking a mimosa. OOPS! Sorry baby.

I can’t tell you how many times I’d lain awake at night through the years, imagining the horror of a late-night intruder or an unexpected pregnancy and what I would do if one of those things ever happened to me. My best guess had been that I would survive, but only as a grim and resentful shell of my former self, my joy in living chewed up and spat out by the merciless maw of Fate.

Those of you who’ve actually survived shit are probably rolling your eyes right now. I know. I was obnoxious. But the truth is, before these two things happened to me, I’d never really had to face much in the way of serious life developments. I worried and worried about them because I had no clue what I could handle.

Which brings me to the second thing these events had in common: They both surprised me, and not just in the sense that I hadn’t expected them. I was caught off guard by how awesome they made me feel. I therefore advise you to get knocked up and burglarized ASAP. Just kidding.

I turned out to be quite lucky in both circumstances. That’s a big reason why I’m able to view them in a positive light today.

The PCP-addled maniac was no criminal mastermind -- just a tweaked-out loser trying to run away from the cops. All he had the mental capacity to do was smash a bunch of windshields on my block, throw himself at my door, jimmy my doorknob, and then run around screaming in circles until the cops caught up with him and tackled him to the ground.

As for the pregnancy: I’m 27, married, and financially stable. Having children might not have been a part of my three-year plan, but keeping this baby wasn’t a terribly brave or even difficult decision.

Nevertheless, I suspect that one or two of you is a sheltered worrywart like me. For that reason, I think it’s important to share with you the good news that it can be a wonderful emotional experience when your worst fears come true. Even if your brain chemistry likes to fuck around with you from time to time, there’s a good chance it will not mess when you have to face life’s big challenges.

I’d read something to this effect about years ago in Gavin de Becker’s book "Protecting the Gift," but I’d never quite believed what he was saying.

“When dreaded outcomes are actually imminent, we don’t worry about them, we take action,” he writes. “Seeing lava from down the local volcano make its way down the street doesn’t cause worry, it causes running.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about until my own private Mauna Loa started erupting. When I realized that the noise in my living room was a person trying to break into my house -- and again, later, when I saw that “pregnant” in the digital window of that pee stick -- I felt not terror, but a sudden wave of clarity and confidence. I was ready to take action. Conquer. Rule. Thrive. Adapt.

When that happened, I was chemically incapable of worry. It was like my body had spontaneously produced its own Adderall. And it was amazing.

Here's what Mr. Tweaky did to the cars on our street.

In the case of Mr. PCP, I went outside and watched in fascination as the cops tackled him to the ground. “Why? Why?” he screamed. My horrified husband hissed at me to get back in the house.

In retrospect, going outside really was a bad idea -- what if he’d had a gun? -- but my point isn’t that I became invincible or brilliant. It’s just that I stopped worrying. At that moment, the very act of worrying seemed pointless and stupid.

As for the baby: the moment I found out I was pregnant -- sitting on the toilet in my office bathroom -- I looked down at my nether regions, looked back up at the test, looked back down, and blurted out: “OH GOD I AM SO SORRY ABOUT ALL THE VYVANSE AND ALCOHOL.”

To my great surprise and relief, I was happy. Not even a small part of me quailed from the task at hand. I was going to have a baby, my baby, and it was my job to love and protect it from this moment forward. I knew I was up to the task, even though I would have laughed in your face if you'd suggested as much five minutes before.

“It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.” That’s a quote from CS Lewis -- a writer with lots of problems, writing in a problematic context -- but he’s correct on that one point. Thus far, all of my life’s-consuming worries have been about things that have never actually happened. They are not the result of living, but of holding myself back from life.

As calm as I am about this unexpected pregnancy, I was a total wreck during my engagement last year. Back then, I had room to torture myself with what-ifs: What if I’m making the wrong decision? What if I’m not cut out for long-term commitment? What if there are better people out there for me and Matt and we’re selling ourselves short?

As soon as I actually got married, and my marriage became an immutable fact of my life, my worries evaporated. Life is so much easier to deal with when it’s real.

Next week, I’m scheduled to go to the OB/GYN for my 12-week ultrasound. This is the one where they check for life-threatening abnormalities as well as conditions such as Down’s Syndrome and trisomy. I have to admit, the worries are bubbling up again: What will I do if the news isn't good?

But I know enough to stop myself now. If there's a complication with the pregnancy, God forbid, I know I will not be afraid in the moment, and I know every part of my brain and body will be there to support me. In the mean time, there is nothing worthwhile to do but live.

Looking back, I can’t say exactly what gave me the impression that getting eaten out was going to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

Maybe it was Family Life class at my high school, where first I learned that female sexual pleasure doesn’t necessarily come from penetration. Maybe it was some article in Cosmo, or maybe it was that classic “I’m Coming!” scene in American Pie.

Whatever it was, I arrived at college convinced of two things: Ayn Rand’s genius and the transformative powers of cunnilingus. Neither was a belief I had tested in practice, but enough smart and enthusiastic people endorsed them that I took them both on faith.

Alas, neither one panned out for me. Within a week of freshman orientation, I discovered what has proven to be life’s key disappointments so far: When people go down on me, nothing happens. Nothing. No matter how skilled the practitioner, no matter how ardent my passion, I just don’t find it pleasurable.

About ten years after a guy went down on me for the first time, I tried guinea pig in South America. It was also disappointing.

For me, cunnilingus is sort of like the cherry tomatoes that appear in those house salads at pizza places: flavorless, with a texture that ranges from wilted and slippery to adamant and cold. Occasionally, I’m surprised by one that’s well-handled and in season, but even then…let’s face it, I’m only biding my time until the damn pizza arrives.

From my friends and the media, I get the impression that I’m in a minority. Most women do like cunnilingus, and yay for them. But how the hell was I ever tricked into believing that all women love it? And why were all of the men I slept with between ages 18 and 23 convinced of that as well?

In my single years, there were times when I honestly wanted to cry from the frustration of delivering the same lines over and over: No, I did not enjoy being eaten out. No, it was not because I’d never been with someone “good at it.” No, it was definitely not because I needed to “relax.”

Yes, we could absolutely go down on me if you found it pleasurable, but no, if you were just saying you found it pleasurable so you could get down there and prove it had all been a misunderstanding between me and my pussy, you were in for a disappointment.

It turns out that I’m not the only person I know who’s “meh” on oral sex. My friend Violet,* 27, has had similar experiences.

“Cunnilingus turned out to be a major letdown,” she wrote to me in an email. “Literature offered such tantalizing perspectives on the subject... I keep hoping I just haven't found a sufficiently adept partner, but I fear this may not be the case. At least I like cuddling (insert ironic, embittered smiley emoticon)!”

Twenty-seven-year old Mary also knew what I was talking about. “I never flat-out told partners that I didn’t enjoy oral sex, but the alacrity with which I suggested we switch positions must have been obvious, right?”

She continued, “When partners did catch on that I really just wasn’t into oral…there was definitely a lot of ‘But I have been really successful using this method with other women’ and ‘You just need to relax.’”

Unlike me and Violet, Mary has had an orgasm from oral sex…once. “I have been sexually active with about 30 partners over 8 years. In that entire span, I have only had an orgasm from oral sex…from one person, and on only one occasion during many sessions of oral sex with that one person. I am here to tell you that this how fetishes are born: it was fucking incredible.”

I’m jealous. I haven’t given up hope that someday, I’ll get to experience what Mary did. But I have my doubts.

Oral sex isn’t the only sexual letdown my friends and I have commiserated about over the years. Here are some other things we all thought Women Were Supposed To Like when we were teenagers: foreplay, candlelight, pillow talk, romance novels, vibrators. Some of us turned out to like those things. Many, however, find them about as interesting as low-sodium rice cakes.

And then there’s “porn for women,” the biggest crock of shit of them all. “Seriously, who likes ‘female’ porn?” Says my friend Olivia, 26.

I remember that when I was a freshman in college, my friend Lynn went to Toys in Babeland and bought a DVD called something like “The Magic Blanket.” Billed as girl-friendly porn, it told the story of a special blanket that -- if used in bed, or on a picnic -- held the power to “enhance intimacy” for anyone touching it.

When Lynn got back to the dorm, she invited me and a bunch of our friends to watch it together. Ninety of the most boring minutes of our lives later, it was finally over.

Lynn popped “The Magic Blanket” out of her computer. “Toys in Babeland doesn’t allow returns unless the merchandise is defective,” she said, frantically scratching at the back of the DVD with her fingernails. “Too -- bad -- this one -- was defective!”

To those of us who had the good fortune to grow up with comprehensive sexual education, you’d think the following would come as no surprise: Sexual preferences vary, and they can be vastly different. Yet I and so many of my peers, male and female, entered adulthood under a different impression, and found ourselves baffled when we didn’t like what we thought we were supposed to.

I for one didn’t always tell my partners that oral sex wasn’t my thing. I was embarrassed to have sexual preferences that I’d internalized as being male: boredom with lengthy communication; desire to go straight to the main event. I felt like a freak. And so I wasted a lot of time pretending to like what I didn’t.

Eventually, through experience and a lot of late-night drunken oversharing, I and all of my friends have managed to become comfortable in our skins. It turned out that some of us could only come from manual stimulation. Some of us could only come by touching ourselves in front of a partner; some of us couldn’t come at all.

Now that we’re in our late twenties, we all realize that these things are exceedingly normal. But it took us -- and our boyfriends -- almost a decade to know that for sure.

I wish I could go back and shout at my high school sex ed teacher, at all the teen movies I watched, and at all the women’s magazines I read -- even the progressive ones. (Hell, I even wish I could shout at that novel "The Time Traveler’s Wife," which cemented my certainty that I was somehow missing out on really, truly great oral sex.)

I’m so glad they gave me as much information as they did. I was never mistaken about how to avoid pregnancy or disease.

Nevertheless, I feel like my education came from too many well-meaning Baby Boomers who -- in their effort to give positive PR to certain once-taboo practices -- went way over the top in their praise.

Sure, cunnilingus might not have been as widespread a practice 50 years ago than it was today, and it’s great that more men are willing to give women’s pleasure the old college try.

But that doesn’t mean “women’s pleasure” is a unified thing that exists.

One need only glance at 27-year-old Alex’s* Twitter page to know he identifies as a feminist.

Among retweets from @abortion_rights and @everydaysexism, there are many original testaments: “#HowToPissABoyOff perpetuate gender stereotypes.” “I signed the ‘no more page 3’ petition.” “The patriarchy: it’s still a thing.”

To me, these Tweets read like a “clean food” lecture from someone I know to have an eating disorder. Even though Alex and I have long since stopped speaking, his angry, consuming, obsessive fear of women was a hallmark of our time together.

It was a classic 22-year-old's love story. Alex and I met in grad school, bonded over our love of modernist literature, and spent the next year and a half “not in a relationship.” We slept together, cooked dinner, viciously argued, forswore each other multiple times and even said we loved each other toward the end. But, you know, we were never boyfriend and girlfriend.

"Alex" took this picture of me on our last weekend together in 2009--a hiking vacation in rural England. He was wonderful, except when he wasn't.

For every wonderful moment I had with Alex -- I often felt like I was in the presence of Doctor Who, about to board a Tardis to God knows where -- there was another in which his fixations and phobias, particularly about women, threatened to flatten us both. For example:

He visibly snarled on his weekly Skype calls with his mother, who’d walked out on him and his dad when he was 10. I had to hide when she called.

He was obsessed with my “number” -- i.e., how many people I’d slept with -- and intimated it was hideously high. (It was in the single digits.)

He told me he was a modern-day Peter from Mrs. Dalloway, and that his Clarissa -- the unattainable love of his life -- was his oblivious best friend from childhood. He was so afraid he’d confess his feelings to her in a moment of weakness that he never, ever drank. Seriously: never.

When “Clarissa” graduated from college, Alex drove all the way back to their hometown -- two-and-a-half hours away -- to buy her a congratulatory sapphire necklace from her favorite local jewelry shop. He was furious that this hurt my feelings.

He also spoke frequently of his first serious girlfriend, a woman he hadn’t talked to in four years. She’d been a big fan of the Grateful Dead. For that reason, whenever we were in a bar or restaurant together and the Grateful Dead started playing in the background, he’d cover his ears, run out in a panic, and wander the streets alone until he could recover.

The first time I tried to break things off, he vomited.

The third time we got back together, he laughingly told me how he’d explained my appeal to his best guy friend: “I know I should leave her, but that Anna, she sure can suck it.” Get it? I was worth keeping for the oral sex.

After Alex and I broke up for good, I joined “Clarissa” and the long-ago ex in the Pantheon of his veneration and loathing. He defriended me on Facebook, but he still VagueTweets about me from time to time (“not my ex, but my why”).

Was Alex really a feminist? That’s not a rhetorical question; I want to know what you think. Alex’s behavior was phobic and obsessive -- occasionally to the point of emotional abuse. But he didn’t Hate Women. He feared a specific subset of them: the ones with whom he fell in love. To the extent he was cruel to me, it was because he felt he had to retaliate against some perceived slight.

Abandonment issues affect people of both genders. Alex did not expand his into a political philosophy. In fact, I think he struggled to make sure he did the exact opposite. So I ask again: Was he a feminist?

Almost every young, urban woman knows an Alex. Beneath nearly all the recent trend pieces about “nice guys,” I’ve seen commenters talking about men they know who claim to be feminists in public, but treat women like crap in private.

I don’t think I’ve written about any topic that’s elicited quite so many groans of recognition from my friends. Twenty-six-year-old Hettie, for instance, told me the story of what happened when a “feminist” mansplainer approached her in a bar. In the course of their flirtatious small talk, she mentioned she was voting for Romney:

"The next thing I hear," she told me, "is ‘how can you say that? You have to vote for Obama to protect your uterus.’ He said that Romney wanted to ‘rip the pill out of my hands.’"

Hettie continued, "I explained that was not true, and he could see footage of the Governor saying 'birth control works just fine. Leave it alone.' I was then told that I was lying to myself, and ‘ignorant women like me’ would set women's rights back 100 years."

Can a guy be a condescending, ignorant asshole and still be a feminist? I've heard other women say similarly smug, factually-squishy things in their own anti-Romney lectures. Was Hettie’s guy somehow different?

Somehow I suspect that discussion of the above might get hung up on Hettie’s own political views, so let’s look at another example. Twenty-seven-year-old Lynn, a high-school English teacher, told me this about a certain “white, male hipster” colleague of hers:

"He's structured his entire 9th grade English course around the idea of 'The Patriarchy' -- but of course, anytime a female teacher dares to disagree with his interpretation of the texts they're reading, or things he's saying about male/female relationships and power structures, we get told why we're wrong and how we don't really get it.

The most infuriating thing about this guy, though, is his jokes. He thinks he's just HILARIOUS and that no joke is off limits for him, regardless of his gender, race, or socioeconomic status. He treats race the same way he treats gender -- as something he has every right to talk about."

Despite all of this, Lynn says, she’s pretty sure her colleague “means well” -- he’s just blinded by his own privilege.

Can someone be a feminist if they believe in equality of the sexes, but also in their own personal superiority uber alles? Lynn’s colleague sounds narcissistic. You know who else is a narcissist? Bill Clinton. He fought so hard for women’s rights during his administration, yet … Monica. Is he a feminist?

My friend Marcy, 24, has inadvertently dated so many faux-menists that she keeps a Microsoft Word file of their golden aphorisms. “Girls like you only date assholes.” “You led me on, so I get to be mad at you.” “Being a guy in this ‘social construct’ is SO HARD.”

In the occasionally frightening things men have said to this poor woman -- all of which she’s saved, rock on -- I see where I personally draw the line between indiscriminate douchery and true sexism. Indiscrimi-douches see themselves as better than most individuals; discriminators see themselves as better than most types of individuals. They think in lazy abstractions.

But I still don’t know the answer to my first question: Can any of the above be feminists? I’d rather not hang out with any of them, but I wonder whether there’s some value in privileged allies who sign the petitions and believe in the letter -- if not the spirit -- of gender equality. Does one need to be a feminist on conscious and subconscious levels in order to be genuine? Who says?

Through the grapevine, I’ve heard that Alex is now in a happy relationship with the single mom of a baby daughter. Despite all his crazy -- and I know this will be hard to believe -- he really did have a good heart, albeit a wounded one, and a childlike sense of wonder. I wish him all the best.

I hope he’s healed and matured. I hope our years of not speaking have brought his conscious beliefs and subconscious feelings into alignment.

But I still don’t know if he’s a feminist.

*Names and identifiable details have been changed in this article, as well as the phrasing of some of "Alex's" tweets -- to make them less Googleable.

The phrase "the hookup culture" must do boffo clickthrough on the New York Times' website. Why else would the country's most respected newspaper debase itself, again and again and again, with regurgitated hand-wringing and "Girls"-sourced trend pieces on one of the laziest, least accurate stereotypes ever perpetuated about young women? (And yes, I know it has a lot of competition.)

This Friday’s style section treats us yet again. "The End of Courtship?", by Alex Williams, quotes Hanna Rosin so extensively that it reads like the second verse of "Boys on the Side," Rosin’s recent Atlantic column. Women are hooking up because changing power dynamic! The End of Men! And so on.

I am a member of the cohort they’re talking about -- 27, upper middle class, East Coast, secular, etc. -- and I have to say that these pieces resemble my friends' and my sexual histories about as well as that random elderly woman's "restoration" of Ecce Homo resembled Jesus Christ.

This is not the case because I Lolo Jones'd my way through my twenties. (Props to her for staying committed to what she believes in; it just wasn't my personal choice.) During the two years between the end of my last college relationship and the beginning of my marital one, my bedroom revue featured a number of guest stars.

Rosin said in the Atlantic that these experiences make me more “empowered.” Am I the only one who can't stand to read the words "empowered" and "sex" in the same piece? Women aren't hair dryers. Our power levels can't be turned up or down by the touch of a penis.

Irritating as Bennett and Rosin’s generalizations are, they're nowhere near as objectionable as the premise on which they’re built. In the universe of the so-called hookup culture, sex is an either/or game, with no room for nuance in the middle. It's lovemaking OR it's hooking up. You're boyfriend and girlfriend, or you're just using each other's bodies.

On behalf of every woman who has had what my friend Lucy* and I like to call Gold Star Sticker Sex, I declare bullshit.

Several years ago, on a long walk through the English countryside, Lucy and I were struggling to define our sexual standards. We weren’t wait-until-marriage types, or even wait-until-exclusivity. Yet neither of us would say we did much in the way of soulless jolly-grinding.

We were somewhere in between: we had sex with friends we liked and trusted, almost as a prize for being awesome. It was our seal of approval: “You’re an attractive and accomplished person, and I admire you. Congratulations! Gold star for you.”

Gold Star Sticker Sex is the opposite of no-strings-attached. It’s shared in the same way you might have shared a deep, dark secret in high school...or one of those BE FRI/ST ENDS necklaces in 2nd grade. It’s not a romantic commitment, but nevertheless, it comes from a loving place -- a desire to enhance intimacy.

Many, although not all, of my girlfriends have had Gold Star Sticker Sex, or they wish they had. Twenty-six-year-old Charlotte is one example. She’s engaged now, but she feels the tug of wanting to share more intimacy with her best guy friend, Dave.

“I want to give myself to him, because the only way I know how to be more intimate with someone than I am with [Dave] is to make love to him,” Charlotte told me in an email.

She continued, “I know that ‘give myself to him’ is a very old-fashioned way of putting it, but it’s the most appropriate. It is a reward, of sorts. It’s a thank-you, certainly. And in some strange way, it’s also a blessing -- a benediction to sanctify our relationship.”

Meanwhile, 27-year-old Molly told me about a conversation she’d recently had with an English friend of hers. “She said something along the lines of, ‘I don’t sleep with Isaac because I am sexually attracted to him, but because I adore him as a friend and I want to be closer.’”

Molly wasn’t convinced. “When she asked if I knew what she meant,” she told me, “I said I did not. Sex changes things.”

Sex does change things. One of the many reasons it’s so exciting is because it’s risky -- you never know quite what it’s going to do. Like a shared adventure, it might endure as a source of naughty nostalgia. But it could also devolve into a friendship-ruining cycle of miscommunication and unrequited love.

Both of those things have happened to me. Two of my best friends on Earth are also past sexual partners. We chat regularly, hang out often, and share the occasional giggle about that one time when we, you know, consummated the thing. My husband likes these people, and they like him. There are no lingering emotions except fondness.

On the other hand, there’s James: an English musician, once a beloved friend of mine, who now no longer speaks to me. Gold Star Sticker Sex was the beginning of the end for us. It was great at first, but then broke down like a laundry machine with all the towels bunched together on one side. He wanted a relationship, and I didn’t; then I wanted a relationship, and he didn’t; then I started dating Matt, and he was hurt and furious.

Lucy, co-creator of the Gold Star Sticker Sex concept, had similarly mixed experiences. Here’s how she put it: “I slept with this guy… in what I thought was a lovely mutual meeting of minds and bumping of uglies. He then avoided me for a week (massively long time in university land, you will remember) because he was ‘afraid that I might want a relationship.’ I was FURIOUS that he'd misinterpreted my motives to that extent, and assumed such a position of power, and basically was a cocky little sh*t.”

“Apart from that particular experience, though, I firmly stand by the gold star rationale,” she says. “It's made me some awesome friends. There's an oceanographer in Massachusetts who sends photos of polar bears when he goes on ships to the Arctic, a dude at the Treasury who buys me those coloured Sobranie cocktail cigarettes, and a chef in Saffron Walden who gives me free toasted sandwiches whenever I stop by -- what more does a girl need to be happy?”

Gold Star Sticker Sex is tricky to pull off. My point, however, is not to give advice here: It’s to emphasize that every day, women in their twenties have meaningful, intimate, sober, relationship-enhancing sex that is also (gasp!) casual. It’s almost as if we have brains.

Now that I’m married, I can’t tell you how grateful I am for my gold-star encounters. This is not because of that old cliché about sowing wild oats. It’s because I know how to distinguish among intellectual fascination, sexual attraction and enduring romantic love; because I realize that all relationships, not just Relationships, require openness and honesty; and because I’ve brought happiness and pleasure into my own life and my friends’.

These things have all happened because I’ve fucked other people…which is why those who condemn all casual sex as part of some tragic “hookup culture” can go fuck themselves.

“Engagement season” has just ended. If you're in your late twenties like me, your Facebook feed is likely now festooned with ring pics and red heart icons. Celebrities have joined the party, too, getting engaged (and in some cases married) this holiday season: Kelly Clarkson! Hugh Hefner! Kat von D and Jesse James, only this time to other people!

Mazel tov, suckers. God, am I glad I'm not you.

I was recently engaged for 14 months. During that time, I learned a secret they never tell you on StyleMePretty: engagements fucking suck. They’re also joyful and fun, but there’s a lot more suck involved than you’d expect.

Frankly, now that I’m married, I’d rather zest my nipples with the citrus zester I got off my bridal registry than go through it all again. If you're just embarking on the experience now, you have my sympathies.

If you're with the right person, planning a wedding is a profound and wonderful thing to do. But then again, so is appearing on A&E’s “Hoarders,” if you’re a hoarder. You might feel a rush when you first commit -- your life is about to CHANGE! For the BETTER! -- and you might be thrilled with the end result. But in between, you're in for a whoooole lotta screaming, clinging to your pile of desiccated rat corpses as Dr. Zasio half-heartedly pats you on the back.

Engagement is a time of monumental transition. You’re redefining your relationship not just with your fiancé, but also with your family, your friends, yourself, your personal space, your dreams and ambitions -- everything. Whoever can face such profound change without at least a twinge of anxiety and grief, please tell me what drug you’re on, because I want some.

In my case, engagement involved a lot of happy moments, but also:

Trolling message boards such as the now-defunct ThereGoesTheBride.com, consuming broken-engagement stories like pornography.

Getting into a screaming, sobbing fight with my mother -- about cake filling! -- at a Father’s Day brunch, while my father looked on in horror.

Getting into another screaming, sobbing fight with my best friend from college as we drove through downtown Washington -- a fight so engrossing that I drove straight into a parked car.

In general, a lot of screaming and sobbing, although remarkably not with my fiancé.

Miserable compromises.

Carbohydrates.

On the whole, I spent 20% of my engagement feeling elated, 20% feeling prostrate with anxiety and grief, and 60% feeling normal. This unnerved me, because it seemed like about the same ratio Pam from “The Office” felt when she was engaged to the guy who wasn’t Jim. When you’re marrying the right person, you’re happy all the time -- right? Because the One makes you happy! Panic is your gut telling you to get out! Right?

Not necessarily. After months of misery, with the help of Allison Moir-Smith’s excellent book Emotionally Engaged, I realized that my anxiety was not the result of a bad relationship. Mostly, it was there because I have been neurotic and change-averse my entire life, and -- surprise! -- nothing about my brain chemistry changed after my boyfriend proposed to me.

However, my anxiety also materialized because I was blindsided by the real work of engagement. After I coped with the shock, I did that work -- much of it in a therapist’s office, yay -- and as a result of that and two kickass wedding planners, my wedding day was every happy cliche come true. My marriage has also been fabulous so far.

Nevertheless, my engagement can go fuck itself.

These days, when I talk to a newly engaged woman, I like to ask her if there’s something she’s already sick of hearing from well-wishers. Even the most easygoing bride usually has something -- some question or comment that irritates her because she feels she can’t reply to it honestly, or else she’ll fail to live up to her culturally-cast role as the happy bride-to-be.

Mine was this: “Are you excited? Are you so excited??” I heard it at least once a day. Often, my true answer was “meh” or an emphatic “no,” but I’d lie and say “yes” to fulfill the expectations of the questioner. Then I’d feel like a gigantic fraud.

Kendra, a newly married woman who works on my floor, hated, “Can I see the ring?”, as the asker’s face would usually shift in surprise or disappointment when they saw her unusual stone.

She also mentioned how annoying it was to hear, “What are your colors?” all the time, as did two other women I talked to. When someone asks that question, what is the asker hoping to hear in reply? Do they really care? Who has “colors” anymore, anyway, is what I want to know -- but will I offend someone by saying that?

The word “bridezilla” drives most newly engaged women up the wall, as does any expressed disdain for the amount of emotion they might or might not have invested in things such as the cake, the invitations, and the flowers. These things can represent much more than meets the eye. They are the talismans of engagement, which, as I've said, is not so much a fun party-planning time as a painful metamorphosis ritual. Respect them accordingly.

M., a book club friend, is getting married on April 20 in Colorado. (Her description of the “Rocky Mountain High” jokes she’s been receiving featured seven sarcastic exclamation points.)

In addition to the usual about colors and aesthetics, one of M.’s pet peeves is when people ask her, in reference to her fiance’s proposal, “Were you surprised?”

“That’s sort of a bitch to answer either way,” she wrote to me. “The truth is that I have a crazy brain that knows how to feel multiple things at the same time. And all of them are true. (Sort of like everyone’s brains, yeah? Yes? Are we all on the same page here?). So, yeah. I was shocked. I screamed. I cried. I yawped my YES! and then made out with him on some rocks while gasping for breath -- again -- out of shock. Also, no, I was not surprised.”

M. is referring to something that every married woman I know experienced during engagement: cognitive dissonance. The instant you get engaged, you start experiencing yourself as an individual and a wife, a present and a future self, a person who is happy and sad and surprised and angry and excited. You’re in a cuckoo purgatory -- mentally, emotionally, physically, culturally. The experience is so disorienting, it literally gave me the spins a couple of times. But nothing I read or saw on TV told me this was normal, save Moir-Smith’s book. If I wasn’t happy, I thought, that must mean I was a bridezilla. Or a cautionary tale-to-be.

God. Yuck. I think I’m getting a rash just thinking back on it now. NEVER AGAIN.

I like to tell people I fell in love with my husband before I knew much about him, including what he looked like, how old he was, and whether or not he was single. This is true -- sort of.

While editing draft chapters from his memoir, I became so enraptured by the way he wove "Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan" into an utterly irrelevant anecdote that I begged my boss to introduce me.

Our first date went well -- we ate shrimp -- and yadda yadda yadda, here I am four years later, typing at our dining room table while he watches "Dallas" upstairs. (Speaking of which: Larry Hagman! Noooo.)

Here's the thing, though: I might have fallen in like with my husband because of his prose, but I fell in love with him because of Charlotte Bronte's. When I finally did meet Matt, I discovered he looked like Edward Rochester, and I'm not going to lie -- that's what really did it for me.

I am a Rochosexual. I have been ever since the eighth grade, when I read Jane Eyre in Mrs. Buchanan's English class. Come Gilbert and Gubar, come Jean Rhys and Kate Beaton and even Julieanne Smolinski, my attraction to the type has persisted: older, swarthy, laconic, melancholy, a little rude, broad-shoulderaaaablaaahhh I'm getting all hot and bothered just writing this.

Were you to meet any of my past, er, intimate partners, you’d have to be Blanche Ingram not to see Mr. Rochester in disguise. I’ve dated a lot of older men, including my husband, who's 14 years my senior. I’ve also dated many British men, loners, and people who are now incandescently gay. (Psst: in the era of no-fault divorce, "madwoman in attic" has been replaced by "closeted homosexuality” as the leading cause of sexy, mysterious torment in a man’s eyes.)

Why do I find these traits so attractive? A Freudian psychologist might suggest daddy issues, but I had one of those dads who wrote and illustrated an ongoing series about the squirrels in our backyard, dropping a page of the story my school lunch bag every day. In other words, he was awesome.

Meanwhile, an evolutionary biologist might point to the nesting capabilities of a landed older gentleman or the enhanced male sex characteristics of a swarthy, muscular brute. That is also bullcrap. I'd bang stump-hand no-eyeball Mr. Rochester just as enthusiastically as I'd bang pre-fire Thornfield Mr. Rochester. No money? No problem!

So what is it? Why am I this way? When I began to write this article, my hypothesis was that the broad strokes of my sexuality were genetic, but the specifics got imprinted in adolescence. Kind of like in the Twilight saga, that stupid no-talent Jane Eyre knockoff, when the werewolf imprints on the baby. Though unspeakably gross in detail, it IS an apt allegory for how I'd always thought things went down: longing erupted from my adolescent endocrine system, flowed into the mold of an attractive thing nearby, and solidified into rock.

Turns out I was literally the only one of my friends who thought sexuality developed that way. Like me, they all remembered a specific moment when they really understood what it was to long for someone. But they'd known all along what they were going to like.

Here's how one friend, 27-year-old Nora*, described it: "In elementary school I was fascinated by strong girls, mostly in books -– Leslie Burke in "Bridge to Terabithia", "The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle" -- but also a few girls around me who I thought were pretty but who were totally unlike me in being brash, athletic, etc."

She continued, “I first understood what it was to long for someone when I was 11 and in sixth grade and fell obsessively in love with this seventh grade girl who for whatever reason (I forget now) started teasing me a lot (she was outgoing and into sports, I was a child who sat around writing Victorian novels). I found her very attractive and I loved having her attention paid to me, so I developed strategies to court it. This was when I realized the exhilaration of getting all the references to love and longing in our culture."

In sum, Nora’s desires were the same throughout childhood. Adolescence didn’t change the tune; it simply added a thumping bass clef.

Other friends reported a similar pattern. One -- a Wallflowers fan since elementary school -- felt her heart sink under a strange new weight of melancholy when she learned a classmate had met Jakob Dylan in person. Another started crushing on superheroes at the age of 5 -- her first love was Michelangelo, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle -- but she didn’t actually lust for her heroes until middle school, when she discovered Greek and Norse mythology.

Twenty-nine-year-old Naomi, a friend of a friend, studied the neuroscience of desire in college. Her hypothesis about sexuality fit my friends’ stories much better than my own. "I think everyone is drawn to a different cocktail of physical and emotional experiences that are for the most part hard-wired,” she said. “It feels like my mind was waiting to experience moments that would help me understand what I was already feeling and wanting."

As for the first “moment” that triggered the bomb: “You will die. It was in that movie about the dog named Beethoven. Maybe also called Beethoven, but the second one. Beethoven 2? It was a scene at the end of the movie where one of the heroines gets put in a dicey situation with an older man who comes onto her."

The actual name of the movie is “Beethoven’s 2nd.” That I knew the answer immediately made me blush. That I remembered the scene in detail made me blush harder, and that I’m pretty sure I was turned on by it, too, made me blush hardest of all.

The scene Naomi is talking about is an attempted rape. You know, typical fare for a PG-rated family film. One of Beethoven’s owners, a teenage girl, attends an alcohol-sodden party at a beach house, for some reason with Beethoven in tow. She leaves him chained to the front of the house, goes inside, and is rather quickly cornered in a bedroom.

As the girl’s attacker closes in, twirling the keys to the locked bedroom door, Beethoven struggles to yank himself free. In the process, he manages to take the entire façade off the beach house, exposing the scene in the bedroom and scaring off the rapist. St. Bernards: what can’t they do?

I don't even know where to begin with what is wrong about that scene, but the truth is that I was just as excited as Naomi when I watched it. I’d repressed the memory out of sheer embarrassment. At just eight years old, I wasn't sexually aroused per se, but I remember going home from the theater thinking Oh man, that was about sex. Penises and vaginas. Fascinating.

Now, as I think back honestly to my childhood, I realize it was full of such proto-sexual moments. There was time I watched "Contact" alone in my basement and suddenly started fantasizing about how nice it would be to sit in the lap of Jodie Foster’s blind colleague -- a minor character played by William Fichtner, every tween girl’s dream -- and let him run his hands over me. I think I was 12.

Yes, this is the man I fantasized about groping me.

Even more embarrassing: when I was a toddler -- a toddler -- I was a huge "Inspector Gadget" fan. It wasn’t because of the gadgets or the gags -- the humorous kind of gags. I liked that show because I was oddly compelled by the scenes in which Inspector Gadget’s niece got kidnapped and tied up. It’s hard to describe what I mean by “oddly compelled,” but those of you who’ve felt it too will know.

I was as far as a kid can be from sexual awakening; I wasn't even aware that intercourse existed. And yet. And yet. A girl was being tied up by dark and powerful older men, and I was interested in that.

Maybe Mr. Rochester was with me all along. Maybe he wasn’t. Either way, I’m still left hanging on my biggest question: WHY? What the fuck? Sexuality is so weird and fascinating.

The answer doesn’t matter to me in a practical sense. My husband has all the good Rochester qualities I love -- rugged good looks, age and experience, strange sense of humor, disdain for pointless social mores -- minus the rapeyness, racial bullshit, and attic of surprises.

Last week, while dancing to the seminal 2004 Shania Twain classic "Party for Two," I started thinking about all the things I regretted from college.

Why "Party for Two" loaded me onto this train of thought is a long story involving good friends, ample red wine, a porcupine costume, and the fact that I spent my entire college career in dead-end monogamous relationships. Never mind. The important thing is that it launched me on a 5-day thinkathon about my undergrad years -- what I wish I had gotten out of them, vs. what I actually did -- and led me to talk to a couple of my friends about the same topic.

We all agree: some of the important life lessons we've learned in the past 5 years would have been much, much easier to absorb in cosseted campus environs. I'm writing them out now in hopes that it'll save a couple of you from the trial and hideous adult error that we've all gone through.

In no particular order:

There are no gold stars for "class participation" on the job.

I've worked at the same literary agency for 4 years -- 7 if you count my long-ago summer internships here -- and although my bosses are generally complimentary, they have one perennial criticism: I’m too talkative.

They’re right. This is not a case of them undervaluing the voice of a young female employee. This is a case of me feeling like I need to say something substantive in every meeting, or else I will get a zero on that part of my report card. Usually, I have something helpful to say, but even when I don’t, I’ll talk for 30 seconds anyway, wasting time with tangential information or an unnecessary opinion.

Even though I’m aware of the problem, shutting up is still a huge struggle for me. It wasn't always. Up until middle school, I routinely got in trouble for daydreaming. However, as soon as I hit 9th grade and "class participation" became as much a part of my grade as substantive competency, I let my blurt flag fly. It got stuck out there, unfurled and frozen, like the Star Spangled Banner on the moon.

These days, silence in any kind of intellectual discussion doesn’t just feel unnatural to me, it feels stupid. But when you're not getting graded on participation per se, talking just to talk is the really stupid thing to do.

It’s okay not to talk in meetings if you have nothing important to say. There are a million better ways to show you’re smart. This is true for Facebook as well as careers.

Critical theory cannot solve your problems.

One of my college boyfriends was handsome, brilliant, kind, committed, and all wrong for me. I was bored and miserable and spent the last year of our relationship desperately wanting to put other penises inside my vagina.

Instead of admitting that to him -- or to myself -- I rationalized my dissatisfaction using big words I had learned in a seminar called “Reading Lacan.” It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, it was that I longed for JOUISSANCE! The ineffable and primal pleasure from which I was disconnected when I entered the realm of the symbolic! Signifiers! Problematize! Liminal! Fragmentary! Etc. etc.

I stayed in that relationship much, much longer than I should have, writing essays about the erotics of self-destruction while hoovering Oreos and getting angrier by the day. Baaaaaaaarf. It was a waste of my boyfriend’s time and mine.

Fitting in is overrated, even when you fit in.

This one comes from my undergrad BFF Caitlin, now a 28-year-old MFA student. “I hadn’t [fit in] in high school and assumed college would be where I found my tribe,” she said. “I did but was still a bit of an odd duck and tried to erase the things that marked me as different…Not everyone will like you. That’s nothing to get worked up about.”

Like Caitlin, I thought college would be like a magical Bat Mitzvah where I and all the other arty bohemian 20th-century-literature lovin’ geeks would join hands and dance an endless Hava Nagila of maturity and understanding.

There were certainly a lot of great people at our college. There were also a number of douches -- douches far douchier than anyone I’d ever met in high school, who managed to be douches *and* progressives *and* lovers of indie rock. Honestly?

My memories of the people who were my “lifelong besties” freshman year are for the most part hostile. My sadness about that tore me up at first, but then I got over it and was much happier.

Just because people are like you doesn’t mean they will like you, and vice versa. Fuck trying to surround yourself with clones. Look for people who lift you up.

The people talking about work are not necessarily the people doing it well.

In college, as in life, there are people who like to talk about how hard they're working, and then there are people who excel. Occasionally, the two populations overlap. Most often, they don't.

If you're spending all your time working and freaking out about work, chances are you haven't learned two of the most important lessons of higher education -- how to prioritize and work efficiently.

Don't let the freakers get to you. As an epic procrastinator with shaky self-confidence, I can't tell you how many times I started to panic when a person looked at me, bug-eyed, and said, "You have HOW many words left to write on the 5,000-word essay due tomorrow?" I'd go home and be sick with anxiety the entire time I was finishing my essay, and then I'd do better than the person who made me sick.

The same principle applies in the working people. Different people have different work styles. If your work style is unusual -- say you're a procrastinator like me -- embrace it. Don't waste all that fun procrastination time beating yourself up (or off) as you noodle around Facebook. Get some sleep, or go do something fun.

Self-deprecation is not the pathway to success.

You will not be proud of every single essay you submit in college. Whether you’re overworked and panicked, you procrastinated way too much, or you just don’t care about the topic, some of your essays are just not going to be that inspiring.

Don’t admit it to your professor. Don’t wince and say, “Sorry about this,” as you turn it in. No matter how well your professor knows you, he or she will not give you extra credit for self-awareness.

Once during my junior year abroad in England, I turned in a subpar paper with typical mincing mincyisms about how it just wasn’t my best and don’t judge me for this disaster.

My tutor, a Korean ex-television presenter whose stunning beauty often summoned equally stunning sexist remarks from some of the older male dons, tsked in reply: “A man would never even think to say something like that.”

This was one of the most useful lessons I learned in college. Self-deprecation doesn’t cost you much when you’re a student, but in the working world, it robs you of promotions, raises, and opportunities you deserve. Who’s going to want to champion your work if you’re leading the charge against it?

Finally, and most important:

Your mother isn't lying about the importance of food, sleep and being gentle with yourself.

Caitlin wishes she could go back in time and march herself to Columbia's mental health services on day 1: "Do not wait until you are crazy. Take preventative measures along the way."

I'm the same way. I didn't seek help for obvious anxiety problems until a memorably horrible week in my sophomore year, when I spent every moment I wasn't in class in bed, weeping and eating a roll of Easter cookies my parents had sent me.

Therapy wasn't actually what saved me that time, although I did see a therapist shortly thereafter, and therapy has been wonderfully useful in the years since. What helped me start to heal was hauling myself to the cafeteria, forcing myself to down fresh fruit and protein, and getting some gentle exercise. The simple stuff is SO important.

Another friend of mine, a 27-year-old nanny and recovering alcoholic, told me about how much she regrets her collegiate relationship with alcohol. "Not getting sober" is her biggest regret, she says, because if she had had interests outside of alcohol at the time, "Maybe I'd have real friends and not party friends."

When South Park's Chef said, "Children, there is a time and place for everything, and it's called college," he was referring to drinking and fucking and smoking weed, all of which can be lots of fun.

Remember, though: "everything" can also include art, and adventure, and writing and comic books and making things grow. I wish I had done more of that stuff.

Whenever someone asks why I bother moonlighting by editing college essays when I have a great job in publishing, I reply that it pays 10 times as much money as freelance writing for about one-tenth the effort. It’s not a lie, per se. If you’re a professional editor in a big city with a solid upper middle class, there is a lot of money to be made in this line of work.

However, the money isn’t what motivates me. The real reason I edit admissions essays is that I’m addicted to applying to college.

“Addicted” might not be the right word. I don’t compulsively fill out applications -- but completing one gives me a dopamine hit analogous to, say, popping a really good zit.

Whenever I see the words “college admissions” in a newspaper or magazine, my eyes drift over to the phrase as if it had a corona. My heartbeat quickens. I feel beckoned to compete, to prove that even though schools are more selective than ever and tuition is higher than ever I can still get admitted and still get a merit scholarship and gold star for me.

It’s strange. It’s sick. I’m 27.

I mailed my own undergraduate admissions applications a decade ago -- exactly a decade ago, as of this week -- yet I can still tell you exactly what I got on the SAT. Actually, I can tell you the two scores I got on two sittings in order to combine my highest Math and Verbal results into “what I got on the SAT.”

I took the GREs for grad school in 2007. My score? Total blank. Can't remember for the life of me what I got. But as if it were yesterday, I can tell you what I got on my my SAT II: Writing, SAT II: US History, a bunch of other SAT IIs, and all my AP exams.

I can still tell you the terrible Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that began my personal statement. And I can still tell you Why I Want to Go to Columbia, more or less word for word ("...study in the shadow of Alexander Hamilton, my historical crush").

Long before high school -- in first grade, as a matter of fact -- I took tap lessons. For some reason, 21 years later, I still know my whole routine by heart: leap, shuffle, ball-change. Leap, shuffle, ball-change. Step CLAP CLAP step CLAP CLAP. Leap, shuffle, ball-change, and on and on in a loop. My parents and sister can remember the steps too. It's become a family touchstone.

So too is my college resume -- my tap-dance of bourgeois achievement -- a thing of nostalgia, a body memory. Who could forget the routine that brought me the blue ribbon, the Ivy League, on recital day? My parents were so proud. Other parents were a delicious combination of admiring and jealous. Step clap clap, step clap Columbia, and on and on in a loop.

Recently, my husband and I bought a house of our own, and my mother finally decided it was time to clear out my childhood bedroom. She brought over a big box of my academic files -- report cards and certificates from kindergarten through college, including an entire Xerox copy of my 2002 undergraduate admissions application.

Oh, boy, was my essay pretentious. I wrote of my "thirst" for knowledge, my desire to be "consumed" by learning. I am shitting you not when I say I wrote several lines of it in a random dialect from the South Pacific, just to establish that I was into that kind of thing. I announced my plans to learn Scots Gaelic and figure out the reason why Jack Kerouac compared God to Pooh Bear at the end of On the Road. (Jesus Christ, Anna, the answer is drugs. DRUGS.)

I didn’t learn Gaelic in college. Here’s a sampling of what I did learn: that it’s a huge, growth-stunting mistake to get in a monogamous relationship on day 1 of college and stay in it for 2 years; that being able to down 4 Mike’s Hard Lemonades in a sitting does not mean you have an awesome tolerance for alcohol; that I’m not as much of a city girl as I imagined; that I desperately want to do something bizarre and unusual with my life and I have no idea what or how. I don’t even know how to phrase what I want. I lack the vocabulary.

Adulthood is terrifying. So are creativity and risk and the idea of living a life that isn’t somehow based on performing for others. How soothing it is to pick up a college application and slip back into the familiar tap dance, the routine all of us from the suburbs know by heart: step, clap clap, step, clap clap.

Fuckits, n.: the rush of yielding to temptation, esp. to behave in a compulsive manner; the flood of relief that occurs after permitting oneself to indulge (see: Case of the Fuckits).

Several years ago, a recovering bulimic taught me this word. She was describing the cycle of her disorder: the days of starvation and white-knuckled control; the inevitable momentary weakness; the first few bites of cookie or pie, eaten in the certainty that moderation would be possible this time; and then finally, inevitably, the tipping point when her willpower gave way and a binge began (“OH FUCK IT!").

Recovery, she told me, was about never giving in to the Fuckits.

As it so happens, the Fuckits are mutual friends of ours. Like those "networkers" who talk to you for five minutes at a cocktail party and then immediately friend you on Facebook, they've managed to connect at one time or another not only with me and her, but pretty much everyone I know.

They have a knack for appearing at the worst times in my life: after a stressful day at work, as I open a bag of candy corn; when I'm already 2 white wines in, contemplating a third; or when I'm staring at Burberry skirts on eBay, biting my cuticles.

They can be lots of fun, but they can also be overbearing, controlling, profligate assholes. No matter how often you spend time with them or what you do when they're there, you always feel a little dirtier in the morning.

In recent years, some of my friends have stopped speaking to the Fuckits. Their lives are better for it. These are the addicts, the Fuckits' favored few. At one time or another, they have each faced a stark choice: stay away from these guys, or die prematurely.

Friends, family, and the Fuckits encouraging me to do the robot at my wedding

My relationship with the Fuckits is less dire. I am what you would call one of their subclinical friends. They come around fairly often, but not so much that they're ruining my life. My impression is that they're at about the same friendship level with the majority of women I know.

Wouldn't it make sense for EVERYONE to defriend the Fuckits? Even if they haven't ruined our lives, why do we want to keep such an unpredictable, irritating, unbalanced company? Is there any reason we're still listening to their crazy schemes after all these years?

For me, yes, there is a reason. They might be full of crap most of the time, but the Fuckits are kind of my heroes.

When someone I know -- or something I read in a magazine -- tells me to be more patient, submissive, practical, or pleasing, the Fuckits know just the right response. When tonight was supposed to be the night of a thousand laundry loads, but I'm just too interested in writing this article, they smile and tap me on the shoulder. If I hear again that no one could possibly procrastinate as much as me and succeed, they make like a Roman emperor in the arena and do a haughty thumbs-down.

The instincts that tell me to go ahead and eat the whole sundae, to drink until I'm drunk, to stay up all night and ruin tomorrow reading random articles on Wikipedia -- they are instincts of surrender, of desire, of just-because-I-want-to. They are hungry, ugly, primal. They would rather expose themselves to embarrassment and criticism than miss out on something delicious.

Even dogs get the Fuckits.

These instincts, these desires for something more, are amoral. They run strong and quick, right past eddies of worry, in search of satisfaction. Like water, they will flow forward by any means we allow: wide, shallow floodplains of cheesecake; deeper, more frightening rapids of change.

I'm scared of the rapids. It's convenient to let my life clog them with inertia and self-loathing, or to build dams in advance by internalizing society's opinions about who I should be.

How often my desires have run toward a big dream, a needed breakup, a lavish and impractical adventure that sounds worthwhile only to me, only to hit an inner Hoover and divert for something shallower. And how wonderful it's been the few times the Fuckits happened onto the scene, drunk as usual, dressed for some reason like Venetian gondoliers, singing in jaunty straw hats as they hand me sticks of dynamite: fuck it, fuuuuuck that shit, dooo it anyway, fuuuuuck that shit.

The Fuckits are irritating. They are insane. The stakes of hanging out with them are high, and I need to start inviting them to better parties.

There's the upper-arm perma-goosebumps, yielding with a barely audible "snap." Then the clogged pores on the nose, giving up under the slightest pressure. Or the nostril-base whitehead, sudden yet predictable in the hour of its coming. Even Amorphous Painful Red Thing, that much-maligned premenstrual lurker, has its charms: with a hot compress and some patience, the endgame usually appears.

If pressed, I guess I'd have to pick a well-aged blackhead for the win. How could you not: one gentle squeeze for the clog, one more for the innards, no swelling, no inflammation, no blood, and just a nice clean pore at the end.

Would that every unpleasantness under your skin were so easy -- or fun -- to extract.

Popping zits is bad, bad, bad. I could have called my dermatologist to get a quote about why, but I suspect you all know. It makes zits worse. It causes scarring. It pushes the nastiness deeper into your skin. It is also mortifying to talk about, even for the extroverted among us. Few sinful behaviors remain unbaptized by the waters of our no-longer-quite-so-Puritan culture, but this is one of them.

So why is it so goddamn satisfying?

"I am obsessed with zit popping," wrote one friend of mine, a 27-year-old childcare professional, in response to my not-at-all-awkward Gmail solicitation for commentary.

Another friend, a consummate WASP, replied, "I am at times one to succumb to the temptation of 'dealing with' my own blemishes.”

"Loooove popping zits," wrote a third, a friend of a friend, after someone forwarded my message to her. “Well not zits really, but I love clearing out white/blackheads.” Oh, honey, that’s like saying you’re not into candy because you only eat chocolate bars.

She was the first woman brave enough to address the second question I asked in my GBlast: “Have you ever popped -- or been tempted to pop -- a romantic partner’s zits?” This is something I am curious about because Hugo Schwyzer and Anna Holmes have written about it as a social phenomenon and not for any personal reason whatsoever I swear.

“I routinely clear out John’s pores, and he doesn’t flinch about it anymore,” she wrote, referring to her husband.

Forwarding this response back to me, our mutual friend chimed in: “In high school, I sometimes popped my boyfriend’s backne…once while he was asleep.”

These two responses were a relief to me, but here’s one that came as a surprise: a story of platonic friends popping each other’s zits. My personal boundary of disgust falls somewhere south of the image of my girlfriends’ sebum splatting onto my thumbnails. Apparently, however, other women are okay with that.

Witness the continued testimony of my WASP friend, who went to my high school:

“There was a room in the back corner of the library, which was an excellent place for studying, gossiping and apparently, group zit-popping sessions. I was truly disgusted on one occasion to observe three friends assisting each other in the act of zit-popping (this included an upper-thigh cyst, uggh, just writing about this is difficult).”

If that image makes your inner Darwin alarm go off, I’m way ahead of you. Of course! Zit popping is fun because we’re apes and we love social grooming with the other members of our tribe. It is like trust-building exercises at summer camp, only with more pus.

To see if my Darwinian epiphany was correct, I emailed my unflappable friend Dr. Ogi Ogas, a neuroscientist, bestselling author, and former “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” contestant.

“This is exactly what it is,” he replied. “Like all primates, we are still wired for grooming. This is a powerful, deep-rooted instinct. Grooming consists of carefully examining one another's skin and fur for parasites -- and removing them. We are truly wired to enjoy popping zits -- to finding a blemish or bump on our skin and squeezing it, digging it out, or even -- yikes -- biting it.”

I asked him if females enjoyed social grooming more than men, since by my observation, zit-popping was mostly a women’s passion. “Female primates groom (one another) more than males,” he wrote back, “but that would be as far as my knowledge goes!”

Ogi’s insight explained the zit-popping sisterhood (cysterhood?) that was apparently a thing at my high school. But for some reason, after I read it, I was nagged by a sensation of there being more to the story, much the same way I am nagged when I have popped a zit but there are clearly more poppables lurking in the deep.

Yes, zit-popping can induce the same bonding sensation you get during a good backrub or pillow talk. (This feeling is created by the neurochemical oxytocin.) But those of you who love to pop will know that there’s something else that happens in your brain when you get a really good one on the line. You feel so alert, so focused. So ALIVE. Hello, dopamine. Hello, addiction.

One needs only watch a few zit-popping videos on YouTube to understand the excitement -- the bloodlust -- millions of people bring to this activity. Ever since I was introduced to this cinematic genre by “The Taxonomy of Zits,” an epic 2011 Jezebel piece by Tracie Egan Morrissey, I have been fascinated by these.

One example: “The Best Pimple Pop Ever,” a short film that has enjoyed 6.7 million views in the year since its release. Thousands of people still comment on the video every day, including “theuncanspan,” who recently had this to say: “YEA! POP THAT BITCH.”

I’m no evolutionary biologist, but that sounds rather aggressive for mere social grooming.

Hoping for more insight, I reached out to another neuroscientist friend, a respected fellow at a world-famous foreign university. (I’m not going to tell you which one, because he does not want to be remotely identifiable.)

My friend told me he knew of no research to back up the idea that there was anything innately pleasurable about zit popping.

But then he added, “There are some recognized compulsive disorders which might have parallels. One is trichotillomania, which is basically a compulsive pulling-out of hairs. The act of pulling out is described as pleasurable or providing some sort of relief. ...It seems that the difference to zit-popping would be that the latter is usually under better control.”

Sometimes, of course, the impulse is not under control. I’ve known women who compulsively pick at their faces long after the white head is gone and the blood has started to flow. I’ve read about people who go after themselves with tweezers and knives when fingers won’t do.

Perhaps our neuroses run deeper than we think.

“Zit picking is a physical manifestation of the nit picking inside my head," another friend wrote from her NGO job in the Third World. "And there is something deeply satisfying about the term ‘extracting.’ What is that? Extracting is just another word for detoxing, purging, shedding, sloughing."

“There is a lot of satisfaction through the act of purging -- it allows you to wrap your arms around the thing inside you that is bothering you, and then toss it away.”

It’s a compelling explanation. But then again, so is my anonymous neuroscientist friend’s. So is Ogi’s. I can’t tell if my zit-poppin’ passion is biological or psychological or what -- or if it’s something I should be ashamed about.

Science! Why haven’t you figured this out yet?

Tell me: Why do YOU think humanity yearns to pop its zits? Or does the very question strike you as bizarre? Such was the case for at least one of the friends I emailed. She wrote this in reply: “I have never understood the appeal of popping zits because that hurts like a motherfucker BUT if you ever write an article about the borderline-erotic pleasure of peeling off strips of sunburn skin, I’ll be there.”

Then, after a pause, there was one more note: “Oh good I’m really glad I clicked ‘reply all.’ Hi, people I’ve never met. Sorry I’m a monster.”

Of all the regrettable moments in my decade and a half of wasted neural activity, this one makes me cringe the most: the time I wasted half an hour of my precious mortal life on Match.com, obsessing over how to spell the word "okay."

I was about to move back to my hometown after 5 years away. My hope was to avoid falling back into dull routines by falling into the muscled arms of six, maybe seven, special new friends. That is why -- in the reverential book-scented silence of my grad school library -- I gave Match permission to charge me $30+ a month, uploaded a simpering side-angle shot from a recent toga party, and got to work on the first blank in my dating profile: "Who I Am & Who I'm Looking For."

I can't remember much of what I wrote, but I do remember my last sentence exactly as I typed it: "Okay, and maybe just a little geeky." I was adding "geeky" as a giggly aside, as if I were hesitant to admit it. My implication: I, too, was a geek, hiding inside the body of a sexy-faced blonde who went to toga parties. Implication of my implication: Here I was, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl of your very own.

Next, I was supposed to write about my hobbies, but something kept bothering me about what I'd just written. I wish I could say it was the entire premise. No, it was the syntax.

"Okay, and maybe just a little geeky." The most formal spelling of the word "OK," with the interjection properly set off by a comma and everything? Was that too intense? Maybe it just seemed too intense because of the period at the end of the sentence. Periods were so declarative. Deadpan, like Janeane Garofalo. Men did not like Janeane Garofalo. Men also did not like periods.

Maybe an exclamation point was better. "Okay, and maybe just a little geeky!"

Oh, Jesus, no. That was way too strong, like Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction," a bunny-boiling psychopath whose day job, you might recall, was editing. If only Michael Douglas had paid attention to her grammatical fastidiousness! It was a sign!

After literally minutes of obsessing, I hit Enter on my final answer: "Ok and maybe just a little geeky?" No formal "okay," no comma, and an inquisitive little squeak to cap it all off.

Winks and messages started immediately, pouring in by the hundreds. It had been the right choice, and I was delighted, but not surprised. I had more than a decade of experience tinkering and tweaking and recalibrating myself into an ever more sexy fake person, and by now I knew what I was doing.

By this time in my life -- age 23 -- romance, sex, and positioning myself to participate in the above occupied most of my waking thought and energy. I had attended a progressive girls’ school, great college, and grad school, and yet most of what I chose to read in my free time was about making myself look pretty. I'd become the queen of the "ephemeron triflers," to use Mary Wollstonecraft’s phrase, which, by the way, is an excellent band name.

Stories like mine are a feminist cliché, from "Reviving Ophelia" all the way back to “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Way back in 1792, Wollstonecraft described how society both trivialized young women and encouraged them to trivialize themselves. Rereading her now, you'd think her arguments would feel more dated, but no.

My story diverges, however, at the point I got off the hamster wheel of stupidity.

For me, it wasn’t a spontaneous great awakening -- it was marriage. That's right, marriage: an institution I entered in a large church, wearing a big white dress, with 7 bridesmaids and a Bloomie’s registry. THAT is what made me strong and authentic and whole again. It’s not something I’m hugely proud of -- I mean, who likes admitting that it took landing a man to grow up? But it is what it is.

Months after I'd broken up with the last of my Match.com men -- in a multi-week fight that started with him saying, "I like women who speak their mind more than you do," and ended up with me doing so to very very awkward results -- I met someone different.

He seemed oddly charmed when my inner Janeane Garofalo waved a flannel-shirted arm out of a chink in my armor. I stopped wearing short skirts on all of our dates, and he still wanted to have sex with me. I ate a burrito with garlic in it -- same deal. Then I actually farted, and STILL.

The layers of fakery came off little by little, going deeper and deeper, until after four-ish years together I feel more like my 9-year-old self than the person I was 5 years ago. I mean, I'm not spending most of my free time running around in shapeless T-shirts stuffing my face with brownies and watching old "Simpsons" episodes while coloring random shit with colored pencils -- JUST KIDDING I AM AND IT'S GREAT.

I'm weird and gross, and most of all authentic, which was something I was never able to be when I was constantly worrying about how fuckable I am.

Now I spend my mental energy climbing the ladder in my career, poking around all the creepy stores in my neighborhood (there is seriously one called “Parrots, Parrots, Parrots, JUST PARROTS”), running around in circles with my dog, and joining my husband in elaborate performance-art pranks on our friends.

If the guy who told me in 10th grade that I had a nice face but was undateable because my hips were too big said the same thing to me today, I wouldn’t care -- or rather I would, but in the “Self-confidence and the fact that you look like Shrek make this more bearable” sense (rather than the “Go home and burst into tears looking at a crate of Harry & David pears because they look like you” sense).

I've always really liked this line from Broken Social Scene's "Anthems for a 17-Year-Old Girl."

Used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that/Now you're all gone, got your makeup on, and you're not coming back.

I used to like it because I felt beautiful listening to it as I twirled on mascara and pursed my lips in the mirror. Now I like it because it reminds me that I am back, I am back, I am back.

Don't believe the myth that white lace and tulle equals curtains for your authentic self. The right marriage does the exact opposite.

The best part of life with ADHD -- no problem acting on your impulses, such as skydiving!

Imagine for a moment that it’s a winter night in 2008. Back home for the holidays, you're getting ready to meet two high school BFFs for tapas. So far, this has involved 20 minutes of standing in your underwear in your childhood bathroom, tilting the enormous grosgrain bow in your hair juuuust a little to the left, then forward, then to the left again. (Blair Waldorf: so hot right now.)

Next you want to curl your hair, so here is what you do: Plug in the curling iron, press “on,” wander into your bedroom to turn up Vampire Weekend, gaze approvingly at the après-Constance Billiard outfit you’ve laid out on the bed, pull on some sheer black tights, try to put on the ruffled silk top, realize you can't because the bow is impeding your progress (and why in God's name did you put it on first anyway?), take the bow off, go back to the bathroom, curl half of the hair on your head, decide you'd rather be listening to Arcade Fire than “Oxford Comma,” wander back into your room, wake up your laptop to switch the song, and see that you were supposed to be at the restaurant 10 minutes ago.

Thank God: The key isn’t in the garbage again. It’s right there on the living room floor. Grabbing it, you dash three more times up and down the stairs -- you forgot the hair bow, the curling iron is still on, where is your phone -- before finally diving into you mobile Diet Coke can depository and screeching your way to the restaurant.

Only after you’ve hugged your friends -- when you open your coat, and a strange cloud comes over the face of the maitre d’ -- do you look down and realize you forgot to put on fucking pants.

Yes, Virginia: when I was 23, I went to a restaurant without pants on. It was not the first time I'd lived out a common human nightmare, so my brain, well-prepared, immediately sent in the clowns. Along with my friends, I laughed myself to the edge of respiratory arrest. It wasn’t until the three of us had downed a carafe of sangria, me wrapped tightly in my winter coat, that those clowns cleared the stage for the longtime crooner in my cranial revue: dread. Crushing, crushing dread. Sooomething is so, so wrooong with meee. What am I going to dooo?

At various times in my life, I’d been certain I knew what was the matter. In 9th grade, it was the Sin of Sloth (and I’m not even a Catholic). In my master’s program, I was sure it was diabetes, because unless I hopped myself up on Jelly Babies and Diet Coke, I would last 15 minutes max in the library before succumbing to the irresistible -- frighteningly irresistible -- urge to sleep.

After a doctor told me I definitely didn’t have diabetes, I went home and looked up “narcolepsy” on WebMD. Then I tried "depression," because if getting out of bed is the most difficult thing you do all day -- every day -- how could the implications not be existential?

Many loved ones through the years have found names for my problem too: Slothy Slothiness. Another Day in the Life of Disaster Girl. The Anna Show, Where the Rest of Us Can Only be Extras. Subconscious Animosity. Subconscious Disrespect. Laziness. Selfishness. Cruelty. Bob O'Reilly (that one is a long story).

And then there was the dance teacher whose cheerful, simple way of speaking to me was -- I realized to my horror -- not the one she used with everyone, but because she actually believed my intellect equaled my ability to learn the hand jive from "Grease."

The actual name for what I had was, ta-da, ADHD. Four or five percent of the adult population has it (like really has it, as opposed to lying-for-Adderall has it). Almost all of us have spent a lifetime dealing with its symptoms. The condition strikes men and women equally -- or so most researchers believe, according to a little Googling I did on sites like NIMH.gov and Scholastic.com -- but you wouldn’t know that from looking at medical records. Three times as many men as women are diagnosed.

Why is that the case? The answer, it seems, is depressingly Reviving Ophelia: Boys act out, girls internalize. Boys get dragged to the school psychologist; girls cry themselves to sleep. Most affected girls have what’s known as “inattentive-type” ADHD: they’re not blurty or twitchy so much as spacey and sleepy. So their problems go unnoticed.

The worst part of life with ADHD -- no problem acting on your impulses, such as wrapping your bare arms around a crock pot full of boiling chicken stock when there's no lid on it and you're already prone to tripping! (My original plan was to regale you with the photo of what was under this bandage, but my dog has a better track record not making people vomit.)

Back when I was in elementary school, the only diagnosed ADHD-er I knew would interrupt math class, wait for the teacher to ask him if he was “done,” then yell “Done like a piece of steak! HAHAHAHA!” while bouncing up and down in his chair. That’s the kind of behavior that gets you a ride on the Ritalin train. It’s also not what my symptoms looked like -- ever.

Recently, I’ve read a lot of commentary about the rising popularity of ADHD diagnoses and stimulant meds. Are stimulants dangerous? Uh, yes, they can be, and I’m glad I didn’t take them was I was a kid. My case is relatively mild, so I found ways to improvise. Though I have to say it was a shock the first time I tried Adderall at a Ladytron concert. It made me feel so normal. It was like the day 10 years ago when I walked out of the optometrist's wearing my first pair of eyeglasses and gasped, realizing that this whole time everyone else could see LEAVES on the trees.

Drugs are not always the answer, of course, but for many overlooked ADHD women, an explanation feels pretty freaking great. When a doctor handed it to me, I almost cried from the relief. I had spent years feeling childish and incompetent. Since I couldn’t contain those feelings in the box of a diagnosis, they spread across my whole life, tainting my confidence even in my strengths.

If I couldn’t remember to show up places on time and with pants on, could my writing really be any good? Was I ever going to be able to handle a high-level job? What about marriage? Motherhood? The road ahead seemed paved with land mines.

My diagnosis opened the door to so many helpful things: community, support, Dexedrine, tips on nutrition and exercise, and most importantly, the perspective to be confident that I am great at a few things. Pub quizzes are one of them. My career is another; it turns out the higher levels aren't a problem, as long as the intern can do the filing.

Also, there's my coping ability; I did well in school, like many ADHD girls, because I am awesome at blazing adrenaline-fueled rash-causing stressful new trails to accomplishment. (Again, my ADHD is mild. I’m not trying to say, “Just wing it silly!!” to the people who really can’t do that.) If I could solve a math problem through trial and error, I solved it, which served me just fine until the going got Calculus and the heavens echoed with my screams. If I couldn’t wow my humanities teachers with abstract analysis, I could certainly impress them with bitchin’ lateral comparisons.

Treatment has also clued me in to how fascinating ADHD is. Women who find out they have it might find that the condition explains some truly random things about you. For me, that’s Gary Johnson, lack of shame when photographing celebrities, at least three of my romantic choices, love of the way books smell, hatred of the way high-waisted skirts feel, identification with the character Jinny from "The Waves" -- I could go on and on.

With everything we’re hearing now about overdiagnoses and epidemics and stimulant shortages, I just wanted to say that being labeled was one of the best things that ever happened to me.